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Keywords: Elite Sport

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Stray thoughts: Teams that run on love and joy

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 23 August 2022
    1 Comment

    Is ruthlessness an essential part of sporting success? Or are players better off  remembering how lucky they are, have fun, and allow good things to happen to them by treating people with compassion and playing with joy?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The normality of Olympic brutality

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 28 February 2022
    7 Comments

    For anybody surprised about those ‘marquee tent’ moments, as an ABC journalist crudely termed them, the Olympics is as much about torment as it is about achievement. The torment is very much reserved for the athlete, the achievement reserved for officialdom and media and spectator consumption. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The surprising joys of the Olympics in lockdown

    • Brenna Dempsey
    • 14 September 2021

    I have never paid much attention to the Olympics or Paralympics. The games always seemed too patriotic while simultaneously being too individualistic. Plus, I don’t enjoy watching people push themselves so hard for something to the point where they need to throw up. That said, I’m in Melbourne in lockdown, I’m working from home, and living alone and I need to have something on in the background while I work, or I feel too lonely. If I play music, I get distracted. So I decided to tune into the games and have them on in the background, volume low, to see if it helped me focus.

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  • MEDIA

    Mainstream media is dropping the ball on women's sport

    • Marnie Vinall
    • 28 January 2021
    5 Comments

    2021 is set to be a big year for women’s sports — dependent on COVID, of course. Yet, if you looked to the Australian mainstream media’s reporting and coverage of sports, there’s a fair chance you’d get an idea that women’s sports are happening far less than they actually are.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Breaking the glass ceiling in Australian elite sport

    • Erin Riley
    • 17 November 2020
    6 Comments

    If the up-and-across path isn’t available, it makes it all the more important that there are sufficient development opportunities within sports in Australia. Unfortunately, as women’s professional sport has grown in Australia, fewer women have been given coaching roles.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    AFLW continues to make history

    • Kirby Fenwick
    • 13 February 2020
    5 Comments

    Footy returned to our radios, televisions and suburban grounds right around the country last weekend as the fourth season of the AFLW kicked off. It was a weekend of history making moments but it was also a weekend that highlighted some of the very real challenges facing the competition.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Imperfect score for Gold Coast's 'equality' games

    • John Warhurst
    • 24 April 2018
    3 Comments

    The number of medals available to men and women was equal. In this respect the games were better than the cultural norms of some of the competing countries. Integration of disabled athletes was also significant. Against this generally positive background the media persisted in an approach which was needlessly one-eyed.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Don't undersell surging women's football

    • Polly Fletcher
    • 29 January 2018
    6 Comments

    I have always been footy mad. I played in high school, and joined a women's league when I was 16. For me and the record numbers of women who have taken up Aussie Rules over the past year, seeing women playing at the elite level in the AFLW is a dream come true. But it has a way to go until it is revered the way men's football is.

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  • MEDIA

    Gambling on the fat dollar

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 23 March 2017
    3 Comments

    Elite athletes wear Nike. Celebrities wear Nike. Beautiful people. People who take their sports seriously. Well, that's what decades of advertising around the little swooshy tick and 'Just Do It' trademark told us. Fat girls don't deserve to wear Nike because they are supposed to feel ashamed of their ample girths. They should exercise, of course, but in sackcloth and ashes, with downcast faces, signalling they understand their moral depravity. Some people, it seems, still feel that's the way it should be.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    It's more than a game to LGBTI football fans

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 08 February 2017
    3 Comments

    Last year, I attended the AFL Pride Match with the LGBTI youth group Minus18. As I walked to Etihad Stadium, there was something profoundly emotional about seeing rainbows mix with football colours. A huge part of my childhood was no longer alienated from my lived reality. Yet as the game went on like any other, the whole experience recast itself. I felt more and more conspicuous, and I wondered how safe I'd feel if I were watching alone, waving a rainbow flag.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Luckily for Australia, winning really isn't everything

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 22 August 2016
    9 Comments

    Australia appears likely to fall well short of its pre-games medal target. This has led to criticism of the government's funding strategy, which has seen money poured into elite sports where Australia has traditionally been most successful or where medals seemed most likely. This approach inevitably leads people to calculate whether Australia has received 'value for money' for its investments. But it doesn't have much to do with what people actually get out of watching or being part of the Olympics.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Social injustice in international sport

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 25 March 2014
    6 Comments

    The Olympics and World Cup were once seen as a triumph of corporate and athletic enterprise, but today we count the cost. Previous events left countries with decaying venues and huge bills. Government funds line the pockets of corporations but do little for local industry. The Olympics have caused the evictions of more than two million people over the past two decades. It's time to re-think what these events are actually trying to achieve.

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