KEY POINTS:
The Australian Olympic Committee officially named its team yesterday, all 433 of them (we'll have 183 there). But bigger and bolder than the size of the squad are the Australians' ambitions.
AOC director of sport Fiona de Jong says they want to finish inside the top-five on the
medal table. At the past two Games, Australia has finished fourth, but with predictions that other countries such as Britain, Italy and France are on the rise, it ain't going to be easy.
They're nothing if not brash are they, those Aussies, and they sure love a challenge.
And what about us? Um, well, we won't say. Huh? We may well have the best-prepared team and great hopes for a whole stack of athletes, but you won't hear any bold predictions from our officials.
The best you'll get out of sports funding agency Sparc is that, on current predictions, we should do better than Athens.
That's based on analysis which shows that before Athens we had 17 athletes ranked in the top eight. We bagged five medals. This year, we have 27 top-eight ranked athletes.
If you're looking for Sparc to join the dots, forget it. Blame Melbourne - before the 2006 Commonwealth Games, Sparc said it expected New Zealand to win 46 medals.
When the team came home with 31, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Maths doesn't come into winning medals, so it's not as simple as calculating the difference between 17 and 27 and coming up with a formula to figure out how many medals we will earn in Beijing.
But couldn't we be more ambitious?
Can't we just get over the whole attitude that we shouldn't state our goals lest we fall short?
Isn't that defeatist?
A couple of weeks back, at a lunch in Auckland for former Olympians, the conversation turned to predictions. Some of them couldn't see the point in our meek stance. They favoured fighting talk.
Aim for the top, argued some: come out and say that this team will be our most successful ever. (In Seoul, the team earned 13 medals, including three golds - Ian Ferguson and Paul MacDonald in the K2 500m, boardsailor Bruce Kendall, and equestrian Mark Todd - two silvers and eight bronzes.)
That's a tough total. But Ed Hillary didn't get to the top of Everest thinking he couldn't do it.
So I'll say it: this will be our most successful Olympic team.
Do I really believe we'll win 14 or more medals? Probably not.
But isn't the point that we try?
