Land of champs

For a country of 23 million people, Australia's achievements in international sports are incredible. It has won four of the last five cricket world cups; it has nine rugby world championships; its men hockey team is defending world champions and number one side in the world. Besides these three sports where Australia has traditionally dominated, the country also produces, among other world beaters, champion footballers, swimmers, cyclists, bikers and surfers. So what accounts for this outsized sporting success of Australia? There are no easy answers. Most likely a host of factors are responsible. One is that Australia, which to this day has the British monarch as its head of state, has traditionally looked to assert its national identity through success in international sports.

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The wide-open spaces in this sparsely populated country are also thought to have contributed to Australians' affinity for outdoor sports. But Australia would not have been such a big sporting success without a concerted effort by federal and state governments to professionalize Australian sports.

Each of Australia's eight main states/territories has a separate department to promote sports and recreation. They provide monetary and other resources for development of local sports facilities and organization of major sporting events. But the jewel in the crown of these departments is the state-level academies. These academies are responsible for selecting natural talents for various sports and grooming them from an early age. These athletes then compete for place in some of the most competitive sports leagues in the world. As there are only a handful of state-level teams, the competition is tough. That, in any case, is Australia. That kind of professionalism is hard to replicate in a third-world country like Nepal. Perhaps such comparisons between chalk and cheese would also be a little unfair. But if we are to improve in sports, Michael Clark's country offers some valuable lessons.

The biggest of them is that sports can develop only when there is clear political commitment. When the Australian squad to the 1976 Montreal Olympics returned home with one Silver and four Bronze medals—a disaster for a country often described as 'the sporting capital of the world'—the Australian government decided on a complete overhaul of national sports.

The result was the creation in 1981 of the Australian Institute of Sport. Its mandate was to transform a system which until that point had relied on natural talent of athletes to make their mark in international sports. The institute put in place a rigorous scientific regime that focused on right diet and exercise and explored scientific ways to boost athlete performance.

The sporting excellence of Australia today, in other words, is a result of concerted effort. Nepal, on the other hand, has not even been able to do the bare minimum. For a cricket-mad country, there is not a single international stadium; our National Sports Council is packed with political appointees; the football governing body mired in corruption. Nepal has never taken sports seriously. Perhaps we await our own Montreal moment.