Sport is a big part of Australian culture. It follows our tradition and lots of people do it. Some people play for fun, others train for seroious events like the olympics. Since the 1796 olympics when Australia won no gold medals, the Australian government has spent  lots of  money on sporting. They have built an AIS (Australian Institute of Sport) where athletes of all ages train. But some people critiscise that Australians spend too much for the olympics.

Australia is spending 80% of its funds for sport on the olympic games. Some people are think that the government should spend more on less funded sports that aren’t in the olympics like lawn bowls, golf, cricket and australian football. Or even on local sporting clubs that play a wide range of different sports.  Even though some sports like forse racing has loads of  fans, it gets less funding than those less popular sports like boxing and fencing. In fact water polo gets the same amount of funding as tennis, lawn bowls and golf combined. So that that is why people want a lot of this changed so sports that aren’t played in the olympics are fairly funded too. So instead of spending our money just to get gold medals, people say we need to spend our money on netball or soccer, sports that can acheive lots of participation aswell.

But some people disagree like John Coates from AOC (Australian Olympic Comitee). His opinion is that it would offend olympians very much. If we funded less in olympic sports Australia’s medal tally would go down rapidly. Also if they don’t fund thing like weight lifting, nobody will. He says that seeing as lots of olympic sports aren’t very popular they should pay more to motivate kids to do some of these sports and some of these popular sports like footy and cricket don’t need funding because they have enough money already.

I think that non- olympic sports should have increased funding because it’s not fair just to concentrate on the olympics. Whatever the outcome is the government will have made a decision by next year.

By Jerry