Gloves off: John Coates rival Danielle Roche throws hat in the ring

Hockeyroos gold medallist Danielle Roche has launched a campaign to topple Olympic supremo John Coates.

Hockeyroos gold medallist Danielle Roche in Sydney yesterday. Picture: Britta Campion

A battle for control of Australia’s Olympic movement has begun, with Hockeyroos gold medallist Danielle Roche launching a campaign to topple Olympic supremo John Coates from the perch he has occupied for more than a quarter of a ­century.

It is the first challenge Coates has faced as Australian Olympic Committee president since he stepped into the post in 1990.

A ballot will decide whether the AOC continues in its current form until Tokyo or undergoes substantial change to its make-up, governance and funding priorit­ies.

Roche has unveiled a broad reform­ agenda aimed at creating greater collaboration between­ the AOC and the government’s peak sporting body, the Australian Sports Commission, and directing more money to sports and athletes­ instead of the pockets of AOC executives.

An ASC commissioner, former Hockey Australia director and a member of Australia’s gold medal-winning women’s hockey team at the Atlanta Olympics, Roche took aim at the $717,500 consultancy charged by Coates to fill what was previously a volunt­ary post.

She pledged to do the job for nothing and put the money saved towards sports and athletes. “I will work in an honorary ­capacity, which will allow $3 million over a four-year period to be put back into sports and athletes,’’ she said.

“Every dollar that can be saved out of administration and driven back into sports and athletes is a win.’’ Roche said she would commission a line-by-line review of all AOC spending to reduce salar­ies, and administrative and marketing costs.

She pledged to introduce term limits for AOC members and the AOC president, and modernise the AOC constitution.

John Coates, left. Picture: AP

By targeting the consultancy fee charged by Coates at a time when the ASC and the Olympic sports funds are being forced to find savings, Roche is striking at the Achilles heel of the man who delivered Australia the Sydney Olympics but now oversees an ­organisation which spends more money on executive salaries than direct athlete funding.

Despite taking the title “executive president’’ of the AOC, Coates, 66, spends much of the year overseas fulfilling his duties as vice-president of the Inter­national Olympic Committee and president of the International Council of Arbitration for Sport. He has privately said this will be the last term he seeks as AOC president.

Roche, a 46-year-old stockbroker and St Kilda Football Club director, praised Coates, one of the most influential figures in Australia’s Olympic history, for his “enormous’’ contribution to Australian sport. “But I think there comes a time when sport needs to have fresh ideas and new energy to thrive,’’ she said.

The AOC president and other board positions will be decided on May 6. The contest pits Coates’s vast experience, national and international influence, extra­ordinary career achievements and political savvy against a rising woman in sport who offers generational change, financial discip­line and a greater focus on Olympic athletes and teams.

Under the AOC constitution, voting arrangements favour the incumbent. In addition to national sports federations and state organ­isations each having two votes, current members of the AOC executive, AOC life members, members of the AOC athletes’ commission, Australian IOC members and members of the Olympians’ Club of Australia, which is also part of the AOC, all get a vote. The election is likely to split the current AOC board, with some directors expected to back the challenger.

The challenge to Coates follows­ his decision to support Russia’s participation in Rio against the wishes of Australian athletes and the Australian government, his public criticisms during the Rio Games of Australia’s sports funding model and the involv­ement of business leaders in Olympic sports, and his high-profile stoush with ASC chairman John Wylie.

Supporters of Coates will portray Roche as a Wylie stooge, ­enlisted in his power struggle against the AOC boss. However, Roche is not part of Wylie’s Melbourne-based business and polit­ic­al network and, until recently, was a strong supporter of Coates.

Roche, a former vice-president of the Oceania Hockey Federation, has lived in Sydney for the past 20 years and has been on two Olympic teams under Coates as chef de mission. In 1996 she was in the winning Hockeyroos team and in 2008 she went to Beijing at Coates’s invitation as part of the AOC’s athletes services team.

When Coates sued broadcaster Alan Jones for defamation, Roche provided sworn character evidence on his behalf.

For Roche, the turning point came during the Rio Olympics, when Coates launched his public salvo against Wylie, the ASC’s Winning Edge funding model and respected figures such as Mal Speed, John Bertrand and Leigh Clifford, who serve voluntarily on the boards of Olympic sports. Roche wrote a stinging email to Coates in which she lamented his aggressive and divisive approach and urged him to stop playing media and political games.

She argues that for Australian sport to succeed it needs greater collaboration between the AOC and ASC and cannot afford feuds.

“I don’t think anyone in Australian sport enjoyed seeing that, when the athletes were still competing,’’ she said of Coates’s Rio outburst. “We need to be working together. We are in an environment where funding has been cut and budgets have been stretched.”

To enable Coates to continue his IOC work, particularly until the Tokyo Games, Roche would nominate Coates for a newly create­d, honorary AOC position.

The relationship between the AOC and ASC reached its nadir last month when Coates refused to shake Wylie’s hand when the pair crossed paths at an athletics meet. Late last year, Wylie presented a detailed blueprint for a closer relationship between the organisations. Coates rejected it on the grounds that some of the proposals would undermine the independence of the AOC.