Say goodnight John Coates, it’s time to pull the plug on Olympics

It is right to questioned whether John Coates’ work deserves such healthy remuneration and whether it’s time to move on.

AOC boss John Coates is under growing pressure.

The worst day in the life of John Coates was the one where all his achievements were laid out in front of the Australian public. It is a fine line sometimes that divides the famous from infamy.

Coates is hardly a well-paid dope though a $715,000 salary is a nice little earner no matter what job you do. Being challenged just once since 1990 in his role as president of the Australian Olympic Committee indicates Coates is very good at his trade. And also a well-connected and shrewd operator within the Olympic family. So he should be. Since 2013 he has been vice-president of the International Olympic Committee.

That is an abrupt look at the place of Coates in Australian and international sport. Short in length, long on impressive. But people have rightly questioned whether his work deserves such healthy remuneration and just whether after 27 years in the job he might want to move on.

What does $715,000 per annum get you in Olympic currency? Best we can do as a job description for Coates is to reprint the role of the AOC as described on the committee’s home page: “The AOC is responsible for organising and sending Australian athletes, coaches and teams to every Summer and Winter Olympic Games and dealing with the national federations in Australia regarding Olympic matters.” Doesn’t sound as though the job demands Einstein and his mc2.

Sounds like the head job would be for a methodical mind but it also appears about as political as you want to make it. Coates repeatedly says he’s most proud that the AOC is independent of the federal government and gathers its monies from other sources. But having watched the feud between Coates and the Australian Sports Commission, headed by John Wylie, unfold during the Rio Games then it is fair to say a penchant for counting numbers has become a critical asset.

Coates’s contention that the AOC is non-political and that it only requires some deft political soft-shoe expertise is blown away by the intervention this week of federal Sports Minister Greg Hunt. He described as inappropriate words used in an in-house email sent by Coates.

Hunt said, in part, on Thursday: “I want to make it absolutely clear that language which flippantly casts aspersions on those with disabilities is not appropriate and has no place in Australian public or private discourse. It was inappropriate in the past, it’s completely unacceptable in this day and age.”

Tough rebuke from a minister in a government that is said to have nothing to do with the AOC. But the government’s reappointment of Wylie as boss of the ASC for three more years last month is very much government intervention in the AOC. It can only be read as wholehearted government support for Wylie at a most sensitive time for Coates.

The Olympic family is anybody who can do you a favour. It used to include both the AOC and the ASC. Now if one of those institutions is in the family then the other is out. And vice-versa. When Coates and Wylie met in a leg of the Nitro series in February Coates said to Wylie that he did not “shake hands with c…s”.

That Coates is so aggressive and unguarded in conversation it is hardly surprising he used “sheltered workshop” in an internal email. Coates has apologised since the email became public knowledge. “Of course, it was the wrong choice of words,” he said. “I got the email wrong, and apologise.’’

Coates also has the support of political operatives like Graham Richardson who has said that the AOC president is the victim of a smear campaign. No doubt that is also the opinion of Coates but that should be seen as the considerations of the naive. It is actually an election. Coates and Richardson think it a smear campaign because they had not seen a voting process for 27 years.

Wylie v Coates. ASC v AOC. Until Australia’s limp performance at Rio this was a battle hidden by time — the two bodies only gather a profile every four years — and a nation’s lethargy. Given that the health of the nation’s sport is checked only every Olympics, Wylie and Coates are mostly camouflaged figures, no matter how much power they wield.

Remember this really only became a front of book issue when Coates was critical of the ASC’s Winning Edge system to spend the government’s money to prepare sports men and women for their fling at gold.

Australians began to look interested in the issue when two very wealthy men were in dispute about how other people’s money is spent in making them look good. And then when Mike Tancred, Coates’s media man, wrote an open but fawning letter in defence of Coates, Australians became interested in how their money was being used in the name of sport.

Tancred’s letter seemed to be a stream of consciousness that would never allow any criticism of his boss. And it was not surprising then that such was the suffocating culture within the AOC that the public began to hear about complaints and reports of bullying. Even Fiona de Jong, the former AOC chief executive, filed a complaint when she left the committee.

Then it became common knowledge that Coates had not only been president of the AOC for 27 years but that he had not once been challenged until Olympic gold medallist Danielle Roche made her move this year.

So rightly or wrongly we see the AOC as Coates’ fiefdom where very little is challenged or changed. Work complaints carried no weight and if an issue ever broke the surface then it was Tancred who would neutralise it.

As for Wylie, well, he has millions of the government’s money to spend on athletes chasing gold yet where is he held to account for poor showings like Rio? The public was finally exposed to a gold medal industry that was less than transparent and not accountable to the public. Coates is seen as a man who must go because 27 years is time enough: a fair crack of the whip. Roche must be given time and space to see if she can improve the AOC.

And Wylie must now show that his Winning Edge program is the right vehicle to win gold medals. It has been messy and dirty and both Coates and Tancred have been soiled. But it was a bath Australian sport had to have.