Everywhere you look in Paris there are the green and gold uniforms of Australian athletes. Australia is represented in nearly every sport with the exception of fencing and handball.
Overall Australia is fielding more competitors than any country except the hosts France and the behemoth that is the United States.
This is not a new phenomenon. Australia has been in the top five for contingent sizes since fielding over 600 athletes in Sydney. It fielded the largest contingent outside of the USA and the hosts in Tokyo, and sat 4th at Rio and London.
Australia’s presence has grown alongside the expanding roster of Olympic events, especially since the turn of the century.
But why is Australia, a country with just 0.33% of the world population of about 27 million and a lot smaller than the rest of the countries with the top ten sized contingents, fielding so many athletes?
It comes down to a mixture of government investment in Olympic achievement - but also the quirky geography of sport administration.
Breaking the qualifiers
One of the sports viewers may have been surprised to find Australians competing is the new entrant of “Breaking”. Breaking entered the Olympics as a judged artistic sport run as head to head contests in a group stage, followed by an elimination bracket.
Australia’s entrant Dr Rachel “Raygun” Gunn has subsequently gone viral for her incongruous performance on the Olympic stage.
There have been a number of stories and angles explored regarding her performance, but one aspect is the way it represented in microcosm the strange back hallways of Olympic qualification.
The sport was only recently introduced via an agreement between the IOC and DanceSport - a ballroom dancing organisation that previously had no involvement with the largely decentralised and localised breaking scene. They saw a youth oriented dance competition as a way to get into the Olympics when ballroom dancing could not.
Not only did this represent something of a hostile takeover, it also meant a scoring system and qualification pathway had to be settled from scratch quite quickly. It was, to put it mildly, controversial.
As Gunn herself put it in her journal article “The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: The possibilities and politics of sportification”, “The majority of competitions and events are organized by individuals with little to no commercial or public support, and so an outside entity, like WDSF, making top-down decisions for the global breaking scene is going to impact how individual breakers experience and understand their scene.”
What all this means is that Breaking, by default, ended up with a continental qualification system to try to organise a decentralised cultural phenomenon still in the process of being sportified and regulated.
Australia lacked an umbrella organisation until the DanceSport federation created one, and Oceania’s qualifications were still listed as “Date and location TBD” two years ago with an announcement of the other events.
The qualifier
Eventually, a qualifier was organised for the guaranteed Olympic spots on offer. It took place in Sydney with 15 competitors in the women’s draw: 13 Australians and two New Zealanders.
The final was a close affair with Gunn narrowly prevailing under a different scoring system. In this final the scores were not revealed round by round but just announced at the end. Compared with the Olympic outing, Gunn here made a more conventional looking performance against an opponent of a similar level. Her opponent subsequently went on to finish last at a later world qualification event.
It should be noted that Gunn wasn’t a random interloper. She has many years experience in the breaking scene. She had a published record of academic analysis and advocacy on the subject, and has a prior competitive track record. She has competed in other world events and has placed around the middle of the field. She finished 42nd of 78 competitors in a WSDF world event - roughly middle of the pack.
Her performance in this case seems to have been about making a subversive point regarding the homogenisation and sportification of the artform and will no doubt be the subject of future research output.
But the key here is simply that she isn’t one of the world’s best, but still qualified for the Olympics, serving as an interesting example of how Australia fills out its Olympic roster.
The main events
Let’s take a step back to the overall Australian qualification picture and where they all came from. Each Olympic sport has a separate administration which determines how Olympic qualification is to be run. They all generally try to balance getting the world’s best athletes with ensuring people from all over the world qualify.
The majority of Australian athletes, about two thirds, qualify through various methods focused purely getting the best of the best. That’s systems like entry standard times, world rankings, and world qualifying tournaments.
When we break down by events, two-thirds of Olympians compete in athletics, swimming, the team ball sports, and the events using boats.
Australia’s team is large partly because of the breadth of quality athletes in the two biggest sports of athletics and swimming. With the support of government investment, a lot of athletes meet either the entry standards or the world ranking requirements or they do well enough at world qualifying events.
Australia fielded one of the largest athletics contingents this year although it’s well known Australia doesn’t dominate the medals in track and field. It is still however undeniably successful at turning out Olympic-calibre athletes, wherever they may finish come the actual meet. Someone has to finish 8th, 15th, 25th, and these are often Australians.
France as host has over 200 team sport athletes, and among the rest, the US, Japan and Spain all have over 150. The host nation in each Olympics has participation places guaranteed in sports if they can meet bare minimum competitive standards.
Universality and diversity
Beyond just getting the best of the best, most sports also try to get people from all over the world present at the Olympics. This underwrites the IOC message that the Olympics should be a global representation of sport.
At the end of the day the resources and money available in the rich countries means their athletes tend to do the best, so sports try various methods to maximise the presence of other countries for both commercial and altruistic reasons
Athletics and swimming, for example, make up the numbers beyond the world’s top ranked athletes by adding “universality places” to allow unrepresented countries to send their best athlete, regardless of the entry test. Athletics had some controversy this year with having to expand entry due to unclear wording of these rules.
Other sports, however, seek universality by breaking the world up into regions and have qualifiers from different parts of the world. This is usually done via continental tournaments or qualifying pathways.
This leads us back to Oceania.
In football, being part of Oceania was seen as a huge commercial and competitive problem for Australia. But the delineations are a godsend for aspiring Australian Olympians. In 20 of 38 sports some Australian athletes booked their ticket to Paris purely by competing against athletes from Australia, New Zealand, and perhaps the Pacific Islands.
Overall, about 30% of Australians qualified for the Olympics via Oceania qualification pathways. For example the Boomers in men’s basketball just have to do better than New Zealand at the qualifying World Cup tournament to earn an automatic qualifier spot.
Other sports which see Australians qualify mostly through Oceania include boxing, gymnastics, table tennis, water polo and modern pentathlon.
In future years, though, perhaps the single go-to example of the incongruity of continental qualification will be Raygun’s tracksuited performances at LaConcorde. It certainly didn’t come from a random person off the street, but it was a position accessible for Gunn only because of a quirk of geography.
Big numbers, varied routes
Australia fields big Olympian numbers partly because of the pure quality of athlete performance. Its heavy investment in things like athletics, rowing, swimming produces a wide range of athletes able to meet entry standards, even in disciplines where medals are usually out of reach.
However, the proliferation of continental qualifications, dumping Australia into a field of under-resourced minnow nations, are also a key to why Australia is consistently fielding larger teams than major Olympic countries like Japan, Germany and Britain.
This Oceania effect is also why an obscure competitor in a controversially organised sport like Breaking was able to qualify from a very small pool
This isn’t to say all Australian athletes have a quiet and obscure run to the Games, and indeed the largest sports are well established meritocracy. But a look at the numbers shows the Oceania effect is also key to bolstering Australia’s presence at the Games.
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