Olympic athletes voice desire for new AOC leadership and culture

Lachlan Milne says John Coates has overseen a golden ­period in Australian sport but there’s a groundswell for change.

Olympic canoeist Lachlan Milne with Venus Williams at last year’s Rio Olympics.

Lachlan Milne says the Olympics should be about athletes. He wants Saturday’s AOC elections to be about the same thing.

Milne has been part of four Australian teams. He competed in canoeing in Athens and Beijing. In London and Rio, he worked as a volunteer in the Australian Olympic Committee’s athlete services department, trying to make the Olympic experience as rewarding for other athletes as it was for him.

To his bitter disappointment, he couldn’t.

Speaking to The Australian from the Comoro Islands in Africa where he is doing humanitarian work as a pediatric orthopedic surgeon, Milne expresses disillusionment about what he saw in Rio and before that in London, inside the Australian camp.

He saw good people badly treated, witnessed a broken team culture that somewhere had forgotten what the Games were about. He believes an overhaul of the AOC, starting with the election of a new president in Olympic hockey champion Danielle Roche, is essential to provide the team ­atmosphere that athletes need.

“We need to go about things in a different way,’’ he says. “We need to bring people at multiple levels, not just at the top. I think Danni is great. She is a good leader. In terms of someone to step up and take John (Coates)’s place, they are massive shoes to fill but I think Danni is a good person to do that.’’

He says Mr Coates, Australia’s Olympic supremo for a generation, has overseen a golden ­period in Australian sport but there is now a groundswell for change. “We just need a new style of leadership. I think John has lost contact with the athletes a bit. He is out of reach for most athletes on the team and no one sees him,’’ Milne says.

“A lot of kids who are trying out for the next Games would remember Danni winning gold. Danni is a person who any athlete would be happy to go up to, on the side of a court or the rowing course, and have a chat about the issues confronting them. The president should know the athletes and their stories. They should be approachable to every athlete. That is so far removed from John Coates and the role he plays at the moment.’’

Milne’s Rio Games ended badly. He was one of four AOC ­officials publicly admonished for the chain of events that resulted in nine Australian athletes being convicted by a Brazilian court for using tampered Games accreditations to gain entry to a basketball match. He accepts responsibility and has apologised for his part. He was devastated for athletes caught up unwittingly in the scandal.

Milne and other contemporary athletes have been the missing ­voices in an AOC campaign that has centred on Coates and his salary, his suspended media chief Mike Tancred and the bad blood between the AOC boss and Australian Sports Commission chairman John Wylie.

Steve Hooker and Kim Brennan, chairman and deputy of the AOC athletes’ commission, want this to change. They will each cast a vote in Saturday’s secret ballot to elect the AOC president. Two days before the AGM, the 10 members of the athletes’ commission will hold their own secret ballot to ­determine how those votes will be cast.

Hooker and Brennan, both Olympic champions, are urging fellow athletes to make their views known. Brennan says a fundamental question every athlete should consider is the kind of team environment they want at the Olympics. “Every athlete should have the opportunity to produce their best performance,’’ she says.

“It is important for athletes to pay attention to this. We train ­incredibly hard, we talk about the one per centers and doing everything right but the actual sending of a team away is something that can have an impact on performance. We want to get that right.’’

Milne believes Australia didn’t get it right in Rio. He says the treatment of Emma McKeon, a swimmer threatened with missing the closing ceremony for breaking curfew, was rushed and heavy-handed. He was furious at false ­reports the swimming team refused to buy into the Australian team culture.

He said chef de mission Kitty Chiller worked tirelessly leading up to Rio but in the two weeks of the Games appeared to be poorly advised. He described Tancred as intimidating.

“The unhappy workplace in the AOC carries over into the Olympic team,’’ he says.

“I don’t think that is going to change without new leadership and a new culture.’’