Sea change

Australian sport had to hit rock bottom before opting for an academic route to world success. David Fickling charts the rise of a vibrant sports education section and meets two UK students studying sport in Queensland

Australians are mad about sport. Everyone knows that. Down at the beach, on the cricket and footie ovals, on the track and in the pool, they're all into it - and, increasingly, in the classroom.

The possibilities for those wanting to study sports subjects in Australia these days cover the whole gamut - from a masters in sports physiotherapy from the University of Queensland to a bachelor degree in human movement from the University of Western Australia.

It's all a far cry from 1981, when the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) set up the country's first dedicated sports degrees. At that time, the very idea of sport as a major industry seemed incredible.

The institute was born out of the humiliation of the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, Canada, when after twice coming top of the medal tally the country was pushed to third place. Even worse was the result of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, when, for the first time since the 1930s, Australia failed to win a single gold medal.

These twin low points galvanised a country that has always been obsessed with its athletic performance to ask what was going wrong. Two official reports from the early 1970s were dug up from bureaucratic obscurity, and officials began to reappraise the authors' objective of setting up a national sports institute along European lines.

At the same time, sport as a whole was becoming more professional. Well into the 1970s, it had been an overwhelmingly amateur occupation, except for a thin layer of coaches attached to the big name stars. Administration was more often than not the work of retired athletes, and the very concepts of sport science and sport psychology were regarded as slightly suspect.

"Until the mid-1970s sport was socially significant, but no one saw it as a serious career," says Professor Brian Stoddart, one of the founding AIS academics. "We'd always taken it seriously in Australia, but it had always been kitchen table stuff."

The AIS quickly became the powerhouse of sports training in Australia, with 32 of the 58 Australian medallists at the Sydney Olympics being scholars of the institute. But its high-profile success has often distracted attention from the fact that the majority of sports education in Australia is in the peripheral areas of management and science.

There are now an estimated 3,000 students studying sports subjects at Australian universities, and every one of the country's 39 universities has at least one sports course. Six regard it as one of their core subjects. Few of these students are doing the elite training found at the AIS.

Neither was the growth of sports education all government initiative. Sports in the late 1970s had begun to turn themselves from small-scale cottage industries into major revenue earners, with the first major transfer deals being hammered out between AFL rugby clubs in the mid-1970s.

Colour television came to Australia in 1975, at a time when matches were still one of the cheapest things for programmers to buy for their schedules. The blanket coverage ensured that sporting events became both more popular, and more lucrative.

Universities were quick to respond to this. Professor Stoddart's sport media course at the AIS was the first in the world. Incredibly, given the number of column inches and broadcast minutes now devoted to sport, it remains a minority subject even now.

The growth of the industry meant that the potential of sports courses outstripped the ambitions of even their founders. "One of the major reasons for what we were doing was to give sports stars a career once their time was up," says Professor Stoddart. "But the stars are unquestionably in the minority now."

One of the AIS's first alumni was Craig McLatchey, a promising student on a soccer scholarship taking a degree in management and administration, who went on to take a Harvard MBA. With a sports background marked more by enthusiasm than success, he was precisely the sort of bureaucrat frowned on by old-style sports managers.

Any doubts about the benefits of the new system were dispelled by his own rise through the ranks. By the early 1990s he had taken up a position at the head of the Australian Olympic Committee, and his success in bidding for and subsequently running the Sydney Olympics catapulted him into a position on the International Olympic Committee in Geneva.

Frank Pike, another founding academic from the AIS, says that the proof is in the pudding: if Australian sports courses had not been a success, how come it's Australia that's always hosting international sporting events?

This might sound like the boast of an interested party, but the facts bear it out. Alongside the Sydney Olympics and Paralympics, Australia has hosted the 2001 Brisbane goodwill games, the 2002 world masters games in Melbourne and last year's Sydney gay games. The 2003 rugby world cup and 2006 Commonwealth games in Melbourne are both in the pipeline.

All these sports jamborees are good not just for Australian pride, but for jobs and business as well. Sport and recreation is estimated to be worth more than £2bn a year in Australia. Individual events pump in even more money - a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report this year found that the 2000 Olympics put £8.5bn into the New South Wales economy.

Australian courses still consider themselves to be well ahead of their European counterparts, although the old countries are catching up. "We tend to regard them as a bit more traditional, a bit less open to making some of the connections between sports and business," says Professor Stoddart.

Cash-strapped Australian universities market themselves quite deliberately to international students, who bring in revenues far in excess of what domestic students can provide. It's a two-way process: the reputation of the Australian system also means that graduates of local courses tend to be exported to sports bodies around the world. Campus jokes say that British sports institutes are merely branch offices of their Australian counterparts, although the poms are felt to be rapidly catching up.

All this sounds impressive, but Frank Pike believes a little perspective is still needed. The courses are great for business, but there is much more to Australia's success on the track, pitch and pool than just good administration.

"A lot of sports excellence still comes from on-the-job work. Something like sports science is undeniably useful, but it can only teach you so much. The courses can't create good medal tallies on their own," he says.

There are still regions that remain inaccessible to Australian graduates. America, where sport is at its most commercialised and where the structure of the industry is fundamentally different to Australia and Europe, is still impervious to the influence from Down Under.

It's even worth questioning whether a nation of 20 million people can sustain 3,000 new sports administrators, managers and scientists every year. Frank Pike thinks it can.

"There is a saturation point, and so people have to be responsible about taking on only as many students as there are jobs for at the end of it," he says. "But this is a global industry now, and our graduates are working all over the world. There's still a lot of space left."