Aussies - natural born winners

There is something at once exhilarating and depressing about Australian exuberance, the hectares of yellow and gold Afro wigs, painted faces and national flags and the endless refrain of Advance Australia Fair that seeps into the subconscious, manifesting as involuntary humming even among the strongest of rivals.

It is exhilarating because Australian optimism and sheer joy in competition is infectious; depressing because for the rest of us the winners' podiums are so often crowded with their athletes. By this afternoon, Australia had collected 191 medals at the Commonwealth Games, 73 of them gold.

They were rivalled only by Britain, reassembled from the disembodied parts it sends to these Games and reinforced by the extraordinarily strong showing of the Scottish squad.

Together, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel islands of Guernsey and Jersey had harvested 137 medals, 39 gold.

But the UK has a population of 60 million and a US$1.9 trillion ($3 trillion) economy. Australia has 20 million people and a US$640 billion ($1 trillion) economy.

And why should the Australians so outstrip Canada (63 medals), which has 12 million more affluent and sports-crazy people than its antipodean counterpart, and an economy 40 per cent larger?

The standard joke is "something in the water". Instead, it is something in the head.

The Australian psyche is bound in sports, as a passion and as an essential component of national identity. Trite as it may sound, enough scholars and researchers have studied the phenomenon to be fairly certain it is a symbiotic development of competition and culture that began with convict settlement and became entwined with the Anzac mythology that has gained even stronger currency in the 21st century.

The compulsion to succeed is a virtue. And to succeed against the biggest and best has not only driven the Australian character, helped to shape its society, influenced politics and developed a self-assurance that can appear as what one Canadian at the Games described as arrogance. It has also been self-fulfilling. Winning is as natural to Australians as sunshine in Queensland, and just as expected.

Because victory is such an assumed given, emerging athletes are schooled not in hope but in certainty, provided they put in the effort.

Religion

Because sport is a religion of such powerful joy and passion, politicians provide the funds to underwrite that effort. The combination is a potent alchemy that produces champions.

"As the Australian team gathers at the village at night it must be a case of who hasn't [won medals] rather than who has," sports columnist Patrick Smith wrote in the Australian.

"Because medals are so apparently simple to come by at these and recent Games, it is easy to underestimate the effort required to win them. Or just to contest them."

Successful athletes are an aristocracy. Since Aboriginal boxer Lionel Rose in 1967, 11 sportsmen and women have been Australians of the year, far more than those drawn from medicine, the arts or science. In Melbourne, swimmer Ian Thorpe - unable to compete because of illness - socialised with the Queen and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

On any given day, a University of South Australia study found, 55 per cent of the nation's kids will be playing sport. Every year, 13 million Australians regularly head for pool, field, court, track, golf course or beach. Federal, state and local governments spend more than A$2 billion ($2.29 billion) a year on sport. More than one million people volunteer to help out - 15,000 for the 12 days of these Games alone.

And it grew from the foundations of Australia. University of Melbourne historian Dr June Senyard has traced the ascendancy of sport back to the 19th century, when victory on the playing field was treated as an expression of national ambition.

At a personal level, representing Australia was something young men could aspire to long before there was any other form of recognition. For a young and ambitious nation, it was a means of challenging the rest of the world, particularly Britain.

Talent and sport were fostered by egalitarianism. Senyard says that in contrast to England, where sport was delineated by class, competition in Australia was organised by communities that rewarded success by results: "If you were good enough, you won a game."

The snobbery of English society vanished on the playing field, even in golf. In England class determined access; in Australia, public courses opened the door to the masses.

Mass migration after World War II pushed passion beyond the previously narrow field of English sport. Beyond the local inventions of AFL and league, migrants popularised sports ranging from soccer to fencing to gymnastics.

All were in tune infused with local traditions of passion and success, spreading Australian victors across an ever-widening variety of podiums.

Historian Dr Dale James Blair, in the Journal of the Australian War Memorial, equated sport with the enormously potent Anzac legend. Military service initially helped the emergence of many sports. Nationalism fostered both.

Sport and war

"Sport and war have long been synonymous with Australian national identity and the Anzac legend provides one of the great pillars upon which that identity has been built," says Blair. "Sport is of equal, if not greater, standing in the nation's psyche"

Professor John Bloomfield, a former Olympian whose report led to the establishment of the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), says Australian leaders have harnessed passion. From the earliest days sport was seen as reinforcing social values.

"That legacy is still with us in that even now it is widely assumed that sports builds character and nobility."

Bloomfield's landmark book Australia's Sporting Success: The Inside Story, notes that from colonial days Australians demonstrated a "nationalistic aggression", building the foundations of nationalism and self-confidence on cricket successes against England.

That rivalry helped to build the nation: the separate colonies of the 19th century were united by their passion to beat the English, becoming a popular engine of federation into a single Commonwealth.

Because of fervent egalitarianism, sports also helped shaped Australian social and democratic ideals.

Bloomfield says sport became a way of proving to Australians they were as good as anyone else, and of standing up to bigger, stronger opponents. National tenacity and determination first emerged in sports, embodying ideals of manliness, patriotism and self-discipline. Sports also spurred the parallel development of volunteering, now a national institution and a marker of community service and national pride.

As all this fermented in the national psyche and produced an ever-growing, self-perpetuating pantheon of sporting gods, national self-confidence, pride and nationalism became increasingly bound to sports. As it did, politicians attached themselves to its orbit, suffering with the disaster of the 1976 Montreal Olympics (not a single gold) but basking in the glory that followed the creation of the AIS.

No successful politician ignores sports. In Melbourne Prime Minister John Howard popped up ad nauseum, with medallists in the 20km walk, gold-winning cyclist Katie Mactier, at the swimming and table tennis, and doing the Mexican wave at the netball. And Victorian Premier Steve Bracks has presented enough gold to fund the trade deficit.

Political understanding of popular demand for heroes - and growing concerns about health and obesity - guarantees funding for elite sports through the AIS and in the community.

Success breeds expectation breeds ambition. AIS performance psychologist Dr Michael Martin says athletes need evidence of their talent and the facilities and elite competition this funding guarantees provides the results that build self-belief. "That's probably one of the biggest factors in the success of Australian sports."

Another is personal determination. "It's not the medals. It's personal bests, not settling for poor results. I've spoken to bronze, silver and gold medallists who have not performed to their own expectations. They'll take the medal, but at the end of the day they weren't happy with their results."

For the rest of Australia, 171 medals in eight days ain't too bad.