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Following Dave Martin's lead, I searched for "hogan norton olympic medal"
using the Google search form at http://sportsci.org. (Easily the best
search engine in my experience.) I found a good overview of the issues of
the Australian medal tally, written in August by Jane O'Dwyer, general
manager of Sports Medicine Australia. Here's the link:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/Aug00/O'Dwyer.htm. In summary, an
embarrassingly meager tally of medals at the 1976 Montreal Olympics was the
catalyst for the establishment of the Australian Institute of Sport and a
big increase in spending on elite sport. It got the medals, but apparently
there has been little or no trickle-down benefit in terms of increased
physical activity in the population generally.
See also another good overview written on Sept 5 at
http://www.sports.com/olympics/050900price.htm, in which amongst other
things the author asserts that Australia will be disappointed if it gets
the predicted tally of 14 gold medals, 15 silver and 33 bronze at the
Sydney Games, a total of 62. "Olympic officials have said the health of
the national psyche depends on winning... 20 golds." The final tally was
16 gold, 24 silver, and 16 bronze, a total of 56. Was this a disappointing
result, Ozzies?
I've been unable to find on the Web the abstract of the paper by Hogan and
Norton that Dave Martin referred to. I have a hard copy of the abstracts,
but that's not much use to you people. According to Jane O'Dwyer, the
paper (abstract or full article?) is in "Journal of Science and Medicine
in Sport (Vol 3, Iss 2, June 2000)". I checked
SportDiscus, but there are no entries for 2000 for that journal in the
database (yet?).
Will
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