This is on top of the cost of staging the Games and building the venues.

Bronze medal can take over $15,000 a piece. Olympics reporter Rafael Epstein tells us about the study that has also found that fewer and fewer Australians are actually participating in this expensive sport business as it becomes the stuff which fills the schedules for cable and broadcasting media.

[National Anthem played]

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: Every time you hear that tune smile because it's your money. Federal Government has poured a billion dollars into elite sports programs in the last 25 years, working on funding figures from the last four years and ignoring the cost of building Games venues, ignoring the cost of staging the Games from police overtime to repainting train stations and Kevin Norton [phonetic] says each golden smile costs $37 million.

KEVIN NORTON: We found that there was a very strong relationship between the amount of money spent each four year cycle and the success at that Olympics. And that is also a fairly linear function. So the more money you spend, the more medals you bring home.

Based on the fact that the government has spent nearly half a billion dollars in the last four years in preparation for Sydney, that we will win 62 medals in Sydney and we will rank fifth overall and first relative to the population.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: Kevin Norton is head of the School of Physical Education Exercise and Sports Studies at the University of South Australia. His study also posed the question as the money has increased over the years, have we built up a critical mass of expertise so the middle cost gets cheaper with each success?

KEVIN NORTON: No, in fact it's the opposite. It's becoming much more expensive to buy gold. For example, if we kept our funding the same now for the next few Olympic cycles, my guess would be - nobody really knows, but my guess would be based on our research that our performances would slowly slip and maybe a very quick slip down the medal count.

The reason is many other developed countries in particular are spending a lot of money and there is much more seriousness associated with national pride and winning medals and successes in the international arenas such as the Olympic Games. So we would - our performances would deteriorate.

And it is a much more costly thing to go into. I mean the sorts of milliseconds they're trying to shave off. Times in rowing and in cycling. All to do with multi-million dollars bikes and rowing shells and things like that. It's also very expensive for Australians to travel world-wide to get the necessary competition.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: The Head of the Australian Olympic Committee, John Coates, caused controversy when he secured $100 million from SOCOG's budget for the future of Australian sport. Kevin Norton thinks John Coates did the right thing. With Federal money expected to flow less freely after the games.

KEVIN NORTON: So I think the Commonwealth Government's attitude 'read between the lines' that they'd like to withdraw from such heavy funding over time. It's not the sort of thing you go about - you say out loud, you know, weeks before the Olympics. But I'm sure that over time, like many things, they want more private sponsorship.

For example, in the United States their Olympic teams receive zero funding from their national government and it's all sponsored money.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: So is this expected avalanche medals going to get us and our children away from the television and out onto the oval and into the pool? No. In the last 25 years as federal funding to elite sport has increased, Australian adults are less and less fit and our kids are getting fatter.

KEVIN NORTON: I think our approach is very short term.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: What's happening to our participation rates at our community and school level in sport?

KEVIN NORTON: Well, it's dropped. It's dropped dramatically. In the last 20 years we've seen the percentage of adults in Australia who are sedentary when they're asked by the ABS, completely sedentary, it was 20 percent in the early eighties. It's now over 40 percent in the most recent survey. So we see the same pattern with kids.

In the mid eighties one - 95 percent of 10 and 11 year old children in Australia played at least one sporty for their club or school. And twelve years later that had dropped to 54 percent. So you can see the sort of drop out rates are quite alarming. And we're also seeing for the first time enormous rates of overweight and obesity and the sorts of health related problems that go along with that rising dramatically such as diabetes and such forth.

So we are a sporting nation, no doubt about it. We're very competitive on the international arena. But, really, we've got our elite athletes who are champions but the rest of us essentially are spectators and most of us are happy to be spectators.

COMPERE: Kevin Norton heads the School of Physical Education, Sports, Science and Exercise at the University of South Australia. Rafael Epstein speaking to him.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 30 September 2000

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Counting the cost, at $40m per gold medal