Australian Institute of Sport: a jewel destroyed

The federal government is considering what to do with the symbolic heart of sport, which has been destroyed by misplaced priorities.

AIS boss Peter Conde lives in Queensland enjoying an annual salary of $430,000

The federal government is considering what to do with the symbolic heart of sport, the Australian Institute of Sport, the soul of which has been destroyed by misplaced priorities.

While one sports official catches the $40 bus from Sydney to Canberra to save his cash strapped sport as much money as possible, AIS executives are allowed to live interstate and are paid to fly in and out of the capital, flights and accommodation, all on the taxpayer.

Millions have been spent on consultants — including $500,000 paid to the Seven Network for the “Find Your 30” advertising campaign — while prospective Olympic athletes and coaches have held sausage sizzles to raise the money to chase their Tokyo Olympic medal hopes.

This week one Olympic sport, baseball, where Australia is ranked sixth in the world, was told it couldn’t have any money for an Olympic qualifying preparation because it wasn’t considered a medal prospect.

Others have been told their funding will be slashed after the Tokyo Olympics as the AIS seemingly channels money to “guaranteed medals’’ from big sports such as swimming, cycling, rowing, and hockey. Some middle ranking sports, such as gymnastics and volleyball, can’t afford to hire coaches.

Last month, one sporting body’s president paid staff out of his personal bank account pending delayed grant monies.

However there doesn’t seem to be the same economic concerns at the top.

When it comes to management perks, The Australian can reveal that the AIS spent as much as $5 million on recruitment companies and more than $7 million on leadership coaching in two years and half a dozen executives have salaries north of $220,000.

Kate Palmer, the former head of Sport Australia, received renumeration of $452,000 a year but was informed last October that the Australian Sports Commission board wanted to “test the market for her job’’, prompting her resignation.

Government ministers have been shocked at the “explosive’’ findings of former sports minister Rod Kemp’s review of the AIS and its campus in Canberra, which was meant to be a box-ticking exercise.

One of the key criticisms believed to be addressed in the Kemp report is that AIS priorities appear overly heavy on management perks rather than addressing the core needs of sports such as coaching and development.

The AIS — which oversees the high performance aspect of Australian sport — now does little for sport apart from controlling the funding, expected to be around $87 million for Olympic sports after Tokyo 2020, and charging national sports for the AIS facilities and access to sports medicine.

The AIS programs it provides to sports are at times peripheral, while the money it doles out is, for some, derisory. It is a far cry from the centralised world-class system of the 1990s so envied by the rest of the world.

The Kemp report, which was prepared for the cabinet, is so damning of the past decade of funding cuts, and poor strategic decisions, that the future of the AIS is at stake. One of the options is to sell off parts of the AIS campus, but despite spending millions on plans and reports, the government is yet to make such a dramatic decision that would obliterate what was Australia’s sporting jewel. Sports argue the AIS could become a hub for team sports with a critical mass of athletes to restore it to a centralised high-performance campus that benefits all athletes around the country.

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The Australian has investigated what went wrong with the AIS and what impact this decline will have on the country’s medal chances at the Tokyo Olympics and beyond.

In the year 2000-01, when Australian sport was at its peak, the ASC employed 378 staff including 76 coaches and 62 scientists serving 750 athletes on scholarship programs in a collegiate “can-do’’environment.

Now of the nearly 400 staff, there are no coaches, no scholarship holders, but huge swathes of bureaucrats, whose purpose one insider said “appears to be to bully sports and withhold funding”. The extent of the rot will shock readers, as will the spending priorities.

The disintegration of the AIS began after the London Olympics when it lost top coaching, sport science and technical talent because of funding cuts. The AIS then decentralised the Canberra campus and abandoned athlete scholarships, saying sports should take control.

Former Australian Sports Commission chief executive Jim Ferguson said in an exclusive interview this week with The Australian that the AIS has become a shell of is greatness, is unrecognisable and “does not operate in accordance with its governing legislation”. “The reason why our performances are now diminishing on the global stage is because the AIS has been allowed to run down and it has been changed. It is now unrecognisable to what it used to be,” he said.

“The Institute was never set up to disperse money; it was there as a training institution, to develop champion athletes to go on and represent Australia. It was a specialised institution with a very high degree of technical expertise and it created a unique culture of excellence based on a community of interest between coaches, scientists, athletes and administratorsto develop our high performance.”

Ferguson says: “The AIS has become a bureaucratic funding mechanism, not a centre of excellence promoting the best sporting environment, with dynamic cross-fertilisation, applied research and innovation, its essential core expertise, which has gone and it has simply taken on some of the funding and administrative role which used to be performed in the name of the ASC.”

Former director of the AIS Ron Harvey, who was the chief of staff to Malcolm Fraser and also worked for Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and John Howard, ran the sports institute in 1987.

Harvey said the AIS management had been disastrous.

“They’ve lost the plot,” Harvey said. “They are more considered about management than they are caring about the athletes.

“The strength of the institute in 1987 was the coaches … we had people like Charlie Walsh running cycling and over in hockey in Perth we had Ric Charlesworth, Wilma Shakespeare in netball and Rod Marsh running cricket.

“We had 20 coaches who were not only Australia’s best, but the world’s best. There are no coaches today. I think that the management expenses are just incredible. Why the institute would have an office in Melbourne, on Collins Street, I will never know.’’

Underscoring the disconnect between the struggling sports and the AIS executives, the AIS hired a deputy director of applied technology and innovation, Ian Burns from the Team Oracle America’s Cup campaign, again on a big salary.

But he commutes between San Francisco and Sydney and is rarely seen on the Canberra campus in 18 months.

The distancing between executives and sports is so extreme, the sports have no idea what innovations, if any, are in the pipeline.

However one of the schemes he oversees, the Gold Medal Ready program, has been a distraction.

In line with many of the AIS programs these days, it is packaged into a fancy agenda of two days of commando training with the Defence Force.

Another scheme trumpeted by the AIS, a million-dollar athlete management app for athletes to lodge injuries, has been around since 2013 and is so cumbersome some sports don’t use it.

Of the six top executives only two live in Canberra, meaning the travel budget for the flying-in flying-out executives has exploded.

The Australian can reveal that Peter Conde, the head of the AIS, lives in Queensland enjoying an annual salary of $426,000. Conde’s long-term rental accommodation in Canberra, costing tens of thousands a year, is paid out of his salary.

The Australian has documents showing the AIS pays $2 million in rent for various offices in Brisbane and Collins Street in Melbourne.

Several AIS executives live outside Canberra and commute to the city a few days a week.

The AIS’s deputy director sports strategy Alex Newton, originally from UK Sport, lives in Melbourne even though her job was advertised as being based in Canberra.

Newton has told the Olympic sports they have to win medals in Tokyo to get funding for the next four years: a top-end focus that would destroy many middle and lower level sports and Australia will lose another tranche of quality coaches and experts from the system as well as obliterate the aspirations of Australia’s next generation of athletes.

Last week Sports Minister Senator Richard Colbeck heard from disillusioned staffers that the AIS was no longer the place where Australia’s overseas sports greats turned for injury rehabilitation or help.

Senator Colbeck heard how sports still get huge benefits from camps and opportunities at the AIS but that it is too expensive for many sports to go there.

The Matildas for instance, find it cheaper to stay at a swish hotel in Sydney than lodge at the AIS residences.

Some sports that remain at the AIS campus have to pay for the privilege, and the costs of using the sports rehab and physiotherapists are too prohibitively expensive.

“It is so distressing what the AIS has become,’’ one former AIS official said. “This is the zoo without any animals.”

Another insider noted “it is demoralising’’ while one said the “ghost town’’ of the campus resembles a Mad Max movie.