why are you assuming Basketball will get budget cuts?
came closest to a medal on the mens side in history

And i doubt the grass-roots level will be effected to heavily as most of the district comps run off their own earnings (player fees, match fees, spectator fees, ect) not much of gov funding trickles down to the clubs

Could be bad news for the Opals. Back to economy class for them? ;)
But I don't see how this performance can be anything but good for the Boomers with regards to funding.

It's not like Australia blitzed the field in any of the other sports either...

Funding has depended on medals/performance.
Without a medal of any sorts to come home with and the way funds have been allocated in the past, hopefully our overall improvement, junior national teams and players being produced at the highest levels will result in no funding changes.

I'd prefer to see funding given to the lower levels. There's plenty of good 12 year olds who can't play each week because their folks can't afford game fees.

Australian Submarine Corps?
What's ASC?

Also, the Boomers were comfortably better than I've seen them before and exceeded expectations. The Opals swept their group, then fell 1 point short in a boilover. They were on their way to a medal, then randomly lost one game.
I don't think the basketball teams are as dire as you're making it out to be. Quite the contrary actually.

The Opals swept their group, then fell 1 point short in a boilover. They were on their way to a medal, then randomly lost one game.

The Sports Commission's criteria under Winning Edge include medalling at major international competitions - World Champs, Olympics would qualify as such for basketball. They also include consistentcy over time at such events. In essence, they differentiate once-off results from consistent results.

This is one reason the swimming and cycling hierarchies, when commenting on future funding given their below-expectations Olympic showings, are pointing to their good World Championship results over time. I'd expect BA to be doing the same with respect to the Opals. At the same time, BA should argue that the men's team's performance is the harbinger of a period of future success, rather than a once-off good performance.

Of course, all of this may be moot if the Winning Edge strategy is killed, which John Coates is trying to do.

There was an article a couple of days ago that described the value of the Boomers as above $100 million, based on the NBA contract values of players. Interesting to note that's about what it cost Australian taxpayers for the entire Australian Olympic team, this year.

Thanks PeterJohn!

Interesting article here regarding the funding over the last four years against performance.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-22/rio-olympics-2016-how-much-does-a-medal-cost-taxpayer/7748946

Unfortunately, Basketball had the second highest funding $21m of any sport not to get a medal. That would have been on the minimum expectation that the Opals at least would have snagged a medal.

The Boomers were 5 seconds away from a medal, but that might not mean very much to sports administrators looking for performance not excuses.

The expectations for basketball is found in this document at page 17:

https://e170f4f0d04bb03867529f705fb90adffa84fea4.googledrive.com/host/0B9bBfDp77s8CTjZ2M2RpX01LcGM/

The ABC asserts that basketball met its expectations, but that is true only for the Boomers (4th to 8th finish). The Opals were expected to medal but didn't.

There are also some interesting comments about the 'cultural issues and misalignment in the sport [which] are limiting its ability to progress'. Ouch.

Surely you have to compare apples with apples. What are the figures on a per capita basis? Great Britain has more than twice our population, the US ten times as much. How could we afford to spend as much as countries 10 times our size? Would that actually work given that we have a smaller (and often ethnically distinct) pool of talent to draw from?

For instance, your example of UK athletics getting nearly $13 million pa compared to $6.6 million for Aus is a poor one. The UK has a massive pool of talent of African descent who are actually good at that stuff and are probably worth spending that money on to develop that natural talent. We could spend $1 billion trying to cultivate a medal chance in the 100m sprint without any real prospect of success.

That said more about where GB were with their spending then than where we are with our spending now.

I don't want to take away from your assertion that we are an 'extremely multicultural society', because I do think that we are quite a multicultural society (so long as we aren't benchmarking against places that are more multicultural). But I think you need to put things in perspective.

Great Britain, with a population of 64 million, has 3% population of 'black British' (thanks Wiki). That is just under 2 million people of African descent.

Australia has a population of just over 24 million, and we have an indigenous population of about 3% who can obviously be very gifted athletes (but not usually as sprinters).

That said, the population of African migrants is quite low, being below 0.3%. As best I can work out, we have just over about 100,000 citizens who were born in the African region, but which includes all of the ethnic backgrounds of Africa, including white Africans.

So we might, as a generalisation, have about 3% or less of the population base of Great Britain to select from for the top sprinting talent.

My point remains that it might be unwise to get into an arms race on sports funding with bigger countries that can afford to outspend us because they are significantly bigger and have larger GDPs. Per capita, we remain one of the best performing countries in all forms of sport.

FWIW, the argument about comparative funding should consider capacity to pay, as well as population. Latest OECD data has UK's GDP per capita about 10% below Australia's, so all other things being equal, you'd expect them to spend about 10% less per capita on elite sport.

So, given Australia's population is ~24 million and the UK's is ~64 million, the total expenditure on elite sport in Australia should be about about 40% of UK's total spending. The numbers posted above (Anon #597044) - $89 million and $130 million respectively - have Australia spending almost 70% of what UK is spending. So, in economic capacity and population terms, that means we're spending a lot more than the UK - approaching double the per capita share of GDP is going to sport.

Can't help myself sometimes. As a codicil to the above, it's not just about how much a country spends on sport, it's about how it spends it. Some of the discussion of UK's improvement over the last 12 years has talked about how they've spent the money to get the best coaches from around the world into their elite programs. They've taken a strategic approach to junior development by investing in coaching capability and talent ID at lower levels of sports. In Australia, we've closed the AIS residential programs and scattered the associated sports science and talent development functions. Was that a good decision? I'm not sure, but it doesn't look like it.

The UK and Europe are full of countries with high population densities and small travelling distances. They can operate multiple, decentralised high performance programs that create critical mass through geographic nearness. They can learn from each other through intra continental competitions and conferences, far more easily and cheaply than Australian coaches, athletes and sports can.

Frankly, Australia has punched above its weight internationally for years, because we spend more on sport (as per my post above). Once other nations with similar or better economic capacity decided to spend more of that capacity on sport, we were always going to slip down the rankings.

Add to that the '1 in a million' athletes in various individual sports (Ian Thorpe, Eric Heiden, Michael Phelps, Nadia Comaneci, Simone Byles, Usain Bolt, Paavo Nuurmi, Carl Lewis, Chris Hoy, Wu Minxia, Ahn-Hyun Soo). These athletes pop up in sports where they have multiple events at international competitions (speed skating, gymnastics, swimming, diving, track cycling, sprinting, distance running) and are able to collect multiple titles at events. They inflate a country's apparent sporting success significantly. 3 athletes - Ledecky, Phelps and Byles were responsible for almost a third of the USA's gold medals at Rio (13/46).

These '1 in a million' athletes are more likely to occur in countries with large populations and sports where they can win multiple events in a single competition. So they're perfromacnes count more to a country's medal count than a whole team's performance in soccer, basketball, etc.

China, USA, India, Indonesia, etc. all are likely to have more of these potential champions floating around in their populations than is Australia. To the extent a country's economy and sporting system supports these athletes' realising their full potential - while avoiding debilitating injury and burn-out - they're able to use them to improve the country's sporting performance internationally. So China can dominate diving every Olympics, with different, teenage divers each time. The USA regularly produces dominant individuals who each win multiple medals in a single sport.

So Australia has a history too of '1 in a million' athletes in these multiple event sports at international competitions but they're not regularly produced - Cuthbert, Rose, Gould, Thorpe, maybe Klim then I'm struggling. It certainly isn't as frequent as for larger countries. USA usually can produce at least one such athlete every 4 years and, as above, China (and Russia) can as well.

There are around 50 countries with larger populations to draw from than Australia. Only two (USA and Saudi Arabia) have a higher economic capacity (GDP per capita) through which to fund national sporting programsperformance. If those other 48 or so get up there economically, it'll be that much harder for Australia to outperform them. The relative performances of Australia and UK in Rio demonstrates that reality.