Epic level turd polishing from Cheerleader moonlighting as a Minister

Pandy said :

Can we please please invest in more Michelle Jennekes?

+1000. She is a bit fantastic, isn’t she?

Can we please please invest in more Michelle Jennekes?

If some of these over-indulged and spoilt tools spent less time tweeting how awesome they think they are and/or posting posed images of themselves all over ‘social media’ at the drop of a hat, and had actually spent more time training and concentrating on actually acheiving something, then maybe there’d be a few more gold medals in the Australian tally for 2012.

I mean, does anyone really give a flying truck what Stephanie Rice thinks about anything outside of swimming – especially if it involves her ‘intelligent’ views on rugby?

Also, no more bloody recycling retired athletes – it didn’t work for Curry-Kenny years ago, and it certainly hasn’t been worth it this time around either! They retired for a reason, so leave them retired. Surely there has to be some up and coming stars who deserves a chance to succeed at an international level before the Thorpes and Tricketts of the world get another taxpayer funded bite of the apple???

The funniest thing is that New Zealand spends about $2.50 on its athletes; yet time after time they manage to suprise the world at the Olympics every four years.

Grrrr said :

This bashing of elite sport seems pretty hypocritical, especially given some commentors passion for, say, the thugby. I don’t hear those people saying you’d prefer the ACT’s teams to get uniforms, busfare to the weekly matches and nothing else.

If you don’t like any of the olympics or the sports they host, fair enough. Don’t couch your dislike in wild claims that only the best performer in the world deserves their national sporting program, and second (or third) best should get paid nothing.

I have no passion for rugby of either variety, and I believe I’ve dumped on those mobs a number of times in the past. In my opinion the players are, in general, not setting a model that I want my sons to emulate. That ‘s just my point of view. Obviously JB and others around here feel differently, and good on them.

My only wild claim (I think) is that spending substantial amounts of our national treasure on ephemeral elite sporting activities achieves nothing in the long term except lining the pockets of a bunch of shysters who are growing fat while dangling off the olympic teat.

The expenditure of that money does nothing for the health or well being or cohesion of all the families who are out there on Saturday morning cheering for their grommets on various windswept paddocks around the nation. If the money is going to be spent at all then that is where I think it should be directed, and bugger the olympics entirely. It’s a monumental waste of time.

I’m happy for the money to be spent on sport. I just don’t think that at the moment it is well spent.

Leaving the content aside, I’m just a little (read: mildly) bemused that it’s sat there all day without a damn good flogging, I mean, sub-editing.

It’s pretty amateur stuff. I stopped counting after the 15th typo.

I do like seeing so much women’s sport, even if we only see events featuring ‘plucky Aussies’.

And that is the best headline ever!

This bashing of elite sport seems pretty hypocritical, especially given some commentors passion for, say, the thugby. I don’t hear those people saying you’d prefer the ACT’s teams to get uniforms, busfare to the weekly matches and nothing else.

Our “Ttechnically poor” performances are still better than 99.999% of athletes around the world (well, number of nines varies per sport popularity.) Seems to me that qualifies for similar funding level to the best.

If you don’t like any of the olympics or the sports they host, fair enough. Don’t couch your dislike in wild claims that only the best performer in the world deserves their national sporting program, and second (or third) best should get paid nothing.

Also, they’re turkeys because they only got a silver medal? OK! Not sure churlish ranting .. or outright trolling!

It disgusts me that my tax dollar pays for the exorbitant training costs of conceited rockstar swimmers along with “elite” athletes (e.g Michael Diamond, Steve Hooker, Natalie Cook) who choose sports so irrelevant & obscure that actual talent need not be a prerequisite for winning a medal.

A bit like the Daily Telegraph this morning. They combined the Australian and New Zealand medal count and had us at number nine on the medal table.

Comic_and_Gamer_Nerd said :

LSWCHP said :

The whole olympic schtick is a gigantic meaningless and corrupt gravy train that is primarily about putting money into the pockets of a variety of vested interests. If we as a nation had half an ounce of sense we’d abandon the whole thing, dissolve the AIS, and allocate that giant pot of money to the funding of a wide variety of grassroots sporting activities that benefit all Australians, young and old.

Agree 100%
It’s disgusting and heavily corrupt and nothing more than a gross money maker.
It’s unethical to watch it on a commercial station.

One of the IPA turkeys wrote a column in The Age last week detailing his thesis that the “Creepy” Olympic movement is a jingoistic cult designed to promote fascism.

Worth a read:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/let-the-cult-begin-20120721-22gxf.html

LSWCHP said :

The whole olympic schtick is a gigantic meaningless and corrupt gravy train that is primarily about putting money into the pockets of a variety of vested interests. If we as a nation had half an ounce of sense we’d abandon the whole thing, dissolve the AIS, and allocate that giant pot of money to the funding of a wide variety of grassroots sporting activities that benefit all Australians, young and old.

Agree 100%
It’s disgusting and heavily corrupt and nothing more than a gross money maker.
It’s unethical to watch it on a commercial station.

It’s a bloody disgrace.

Notwithstanding plastic bags, any party that would cut all funding to elite sport and put it towards something useful would probably get my vote.

The whole olympic schtick is a gigantic meaningless and corrupt gravy train that is primarily about putting money into the pockets of a variety of vested interests. If we as a nation had half an ounce of sense we’d abandon the whole thing, dissolve the AIS, and allocate that giant pot of money to the funding of a wide variety of grassroots sporting activities that benefit all Australians, young and old.

I think the history says it all, unfortunately, and I think all we have there is excuses.- our ranking is nearing 1936 Berlin and 1976 Montreal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_at_the_Olympics#Medals_by_Summer_Games

All that being said, I think the AIS is a worthwhile institution, and if kids are in any way inspired to get off the couch by what they do, then its worth it.

johnboy, you can’t even admit there have been great performances by Australians who were beaten by someone who just broke the World Record? “The only thing that counts is gold” – glad someone so mean spiritied as yourself is not in charge of anything sports related! Looks to me like this whole post is a desperate attempt to give a pollie a hard time.

Chop71 said :

why don’t they pay HECS like the rest of Australia?

…and Kate Lumpy (Sic) should pay a HECS like payment on her junket

Why should she? She’s the minister for Sport, for goodness sake. I’d like to see you pay work expenses out of your own pocket. I can only imagine the complaints and whinging that would follow.

Ethiopia is ahead of us. Their athletes are obviously hungrier than ours.

why don’t they pay HECS like the rest of Australia?

…and Kate Lumpy (Sic) should pay a HECS like payment on her junket

switch said :

North Korea is ahead of us. Perhaps we should adopt their attitude to failure.

North Korea is streets ahead of the rest of the world, if your metric is “Medals by GDP”:

http://simon.forsyth.net/olympicsGDP2012.html

Kurrajong said :

Worst of all – the Kiwis are ahead of us on the medal tally. Good grief, what has this come to. Expect money to thrown at the AIS and its cohorts like never before.

North Korea is ahead of us. Perhaps we should adopt their attitude to failure.

Postalgeek said :

bundah said :

I can’t help feeling that we became somewhat complacent after all that success in the last three Olympics and simply didn’t work as hard as the poms hence the lack of gold.I’ll be interested to see what the post-mortem reveals.But in the meantime silver is the new gold!

I’m sure the post-mortem wails will include complaints about funding, because of course not nearly enough money has been poured into something as useful and practical as the Olympic games (an event that has been so over-inflated that only the most developed economies could hope or want to host it) and we all know trade is won and lost on medal tallies.

I’d sooner see wifi on buses than see any more money poured into this gold-counting jingoistic junket.

Why has John Coates still got his snout in it?

The AOC positions should be spilled to new blood every 4 years. It’s a cushy enough job without turning it into a lifetime sinecure for dodgy grafters.

Kurrajong said :

Worst of all – the Kiwis are ahead of us on the medal tally. Good grief, what has this come to.

This. Oh, the shame.

johnboy said :

she could always get rolled in pre-selection!

True, but with the quality of new candidates, I’d be surprised.

PantsMan said :

Doesn’t ministerial accountability require that Kate Lundy resign?

Why do people in Canberra continue to vote for her?

Because she is Labor, and this is a Labor town.

Doesn’t ministerial accountability require that Kate Lundy resign?

Why do people in Canberra continue to vote for her?

It’s very easy to criticise the lack of gold medals but overall it seems to me that the Aussies have done very well. I agree with the concept that a silver is still avery worthy medal, especially when the results are not only close but the individual performance of our athlete is within their pb range.

Too much emphasis is placed on Gold Gold Gold… but it is symptomatic of the kind of me me me society that Austrlaia has become, so it’s to be expected.

The sad thing is that the money provided goes to a few sports and the other sports where we have athletes representing us are left out in the cold. The best example I know of to show this is that the Archery program was completely dismantled, however Taylor Worth managed to defeat the top ranked archer in the world (rankings outside the olympics included as most sports don’t just exist for one event every four years).

On the other hand, how much money has been poured into swimming?

Kurrajong said :

Expect money to thrown at the AIS and its cohorts like never before.

… except for after Montreal … and before Sydney …

It’s like the Olympics of my youth, where we racked up silver and bronze but struggled to crack it for gold. No biggie. I’m led to believe there’s 2 or 3 more golds coming, but that’ll be it.

bundah said :

I can’t help feeling that we became somewhat complacent after all that success in the last three Olympics and simply didn’t work as hard as the poms hence the lack of gold.I’ll be interested to see what the post-mortem reveals.But in the meantime silver is the new gold!

I’m sure the post-mortem wails will include complaints about funding, because of course not nearly enough money has been poured into something as useful and practical as the Olympic games (an event that has been so over-inflated that only the most developed economies could hope or want to host it) and we all know trade is won and lost on medal tallies.

I’d sooner see wifi on buses than see any more money poured into this gold-counting jingoistic junket.

Worst of all – the Kiwis are ahead of us on the medal tally. Good grief, what has this come to. Expect money to thrown at the AIS and its cohorts like never before.

Medals of any colour are good. It means those atheletes are the top 3 in the world. We may not have done as well at swimming as previous but in the other sports we are doing better than ever.
Also Australia has a very small pool of people to choose from.
Australia has done well. 🙂

A very nice junket for Ms Lundy, too – I s’pose she felt obliged to make it look as if she is actually working, by issuing a press release.

Sideline – is it just me or is Ch 9’s Olympics coverage totally crap? I only ever want to watch diving and gymnastics (don’t care if Aust or not), but refuse to watch for four hours ‘in case’ of maybe 5 mins of same. Why are we not getting multiple coverage now there are multiple channels?

I still reminisce about the ABC’s excellent coverage of the Munich games when I was about eight, with only one channel!!! I saw not only Shane Gould, but in particular, Olga Korbut doing her thing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=461zBWmJHNc&feature=related

I can’t help feeling that we became somewhat complacent after all that success in the last three Olympics and simply didn’t work as hard as the poms hence the lack of gold.I’ll be interested to see what the post-mortem reveals.But in the meantime silver is the new gold!