Lifting our game

JUST put on your big girl's pants!"

Thus yelled a beloved British mate to her home team during those early, despairing days of the Olympics, when Team GB was inspiring front-page splashes along the lines of Wanted: Gold Medal. The mate's choice turn of phrase was pleading for all the grit and brusqueness and tenacity associated with the traditional bluestocking's eminently sensible undergarments: i.e., just get on with the job and do it.

Which they did. Magnificently. I saw the seeds of that glory four years ago. The scene: an inner London state primary, brimming with kids more interested in the Notting Hill Carnival than sport. One day an alien force visited: sporting officials. All the six-year-olds got on the floor, bent over knees, flexed toes.

My boy's mate was pulled out; the one who'd never kicked a footy, let alone held a cricket bat in his life. "Son, we're going to make you a diver." "But I can't even swim!" (Not uncommon among inner-city Londoners.) "We'll teach you." They did. Because they'd discerned something in his strength and flexibility. The goal: the 2020 Olympics.

The little man eventually pulled out; the sheer grind and competitiveness wasn't for him or his family, but it was a lesson in far-sighted preparation from a nation not usually associated, until recently, with the glories of modern Olympic sport.

John Coates, president of our own Olympic Committee, lamented that Australia has to think harder about sport in schools.

"You've got ... to look at what the rest of the world is doing. High performance in other countries has gone past us." I got a sinking feeling about Team Australia during the opening ceremony; there was something a little too cocky yet haphazard about the way they were all walking in their ranks (too kind a word), about the way they were "bunched".

It all felt a tad too ragged, yet bolshy; such a fatal, hubristic combination.

There's another area that intrigues in terms of Australia and how the rest of the world is preparing for the future. One of the reasons we left Britain was because the kids were galloping into the trauma of the 11-plus exams. All around us were children being tutored, some of them three times a week; 10- and 11-year-olds with anxiety rashes on their faces, having breakdowns, hating parents. It just didn't feel right in terms of how kids should be raised; as one Londoner remarked, "It's child abuse." Yet we now know that tutoring is rampant not only in London but across New York, Seoul, Shanghai - and in Australia's main cities, too.

Our eldest son's taken competitive exams this year for high-school entry and what's intrigued us are stories of kids who've been tutored since kindergarten, who go to not one but three coaching colleges a week. How is this skewing results? What kind of adults are being raised here? An educator tells me the flipside is rarely discussed: breakdowns, suicides, tender young psyches imploding under the enormous pressure to succeed.

But how to compete? Some of the nation's top selective state schools have demographics that are 90 per cent Asian. It'll be intriguing to see how these kinds of figures - this disconnect in cultural discipline and work ethic - impacts upon Australia in generations to come. Will there be an Anglo class of achievement that sits quite differently to that ingrained, tenacious drive of the Asian student?

Will we all be pulled up by example? There's been a lot of talk recently of the world leaving us behind in sport, but we have to look at other areas, too. That lovely, laconic Aussie attitude of "she'll be right, mate" - seen abundantly in our team's stroll during the opening ceremony - may not be enough in this increasingly competitive, internationalised world that's stepping up its game all around us. In every arena, not just the sporting.