John Coates offers an olive branch, with a sting in the tail

AOC president John Coates has offered the Australian Sports Commission chair John Wylie an olive branch.

AOC President John Coates.

In the latest twist in the increasingly bitter battle between Australia’s sporting overlords, Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates has offered Australian Sports Commission chair John Wylie an olive branch. Albeit with a sting in the tail.

In a letter sent to Wylie yesterday — and copied to Sports Minister Greg Hunt — Coates offered a “draft framework for a partnership agreement between our two organisations”.

But an Olympic insider yesterday made it clear that the letter should not be considered a backdown and that while Coates is keen to co-operate with the Sports Commission and the Institute of Sport, neither Wylie nor AIS boss Matt Favier would have a say in the AOC’s Olympics planning.

The letter comes just over a week after the two clashed at the hugely successful Nitro athletics series in Melbourne, with Coates refusing to shake Wylie’s hand. The AOC president then proceeded to let Wylie have it with both barrels over his belief the ASC chair and Favier had been undermining him ahead of the AOC’s AGM in May, where Coates faces re-election.

Coates followed that earlier this week by sending an email to Favier — who had been part of the AOC’s planning team for the Rio Games as a deputy chef de mission — informing him his services would no longer be required for the Tokyo 2020 team.

The Australian understands yesterday’s letter, which outlines close to 15 areas of “potential co-operation”, had nothing to do with the Nitro blow-up but was Coates’s response to a letter he had received from Wylie during the fallout over Australia’s poor Rio Olympic performance under its new funding model, Winning Edge. Australia fell to 10th on the overall medal tally in Rio.

Wylie had proposed that they “reset the working relationships ... for the common good of Olympic sport in this country”. But he went on to suggest the Sports Commission should have a role in deciding the Australian Olympic team’s chef de mission.

That sparked another public rebuke from Coates, who accused Wylie of trying to compromise the independence of his organisation — which he has fiercely defended since the government intervention in favour of boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Wylie believes that as the Sports Commission directs the money into Olympic athlete funding, it should have a say in some capacity during Games time.

Given he removed Favier from the Games’ brains trust, the most surprising suggestion in Coates’s letter is that the two organisations again join forces for Tokyo 2020.

“While the AOC has exclusive authority for the representation and participation for Australia at the Olympic Games (Olympic Charter Rule 27.3) for Tokyo 2020 we would like to again work with the AIS … in our planning and preparations,” it reads.

However, as a pointer to the sorry state of the relationship between the men in charge, an AOC insider said “that invitation does not extend to either Wylie or Favier to be part of the 2020 Olympic team”.

Instead, The Australian understands the AOC would like to continue to work with the AIS staff who were part of the Rio Games team, particularly the head of the medical staff David Hughes.

Yesterday, the Sports Commission said it would give the correspondence the “appropriate consideration”.

“The ASC would welcome a more constructive working relationship between the two organisations, as we have previously indicated,” a Sports Commission spokesman said.

Coates’s letter finishes by saying the AOC will “continue to support the ASC in its efforts to establish an online national lottery for sport and in seeking increased government appropriations for sport”.

“We are open to any other areas for co-operation which you identify for which the AOC does not have exclusive authority under the Olympic charter and which do not involve the AOC funding ASC programs.”