Swimming Australia dives into the ‘no more John Coates’ camp

Australia’s most successful Olympic sport has signalled its support for a change at the top of the AOC.

Swimming Australia president John Bertrand in Melbourne yesterday. Picture: David Geraghty

Australia’s most successful Olympic sport has signalled its support for a change at the top of the AOC, with Swimming Australia president John Bertrand arguing that any organisation needs “new talent, new energy, new ideas’’ to improve.

Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates is ­facing a challenge from Hockeyroos Olympic gold medallist Danielle Roche to keep the post he has held for 26 years.

Ms Roche has released a ­detailed reform agenda that targets generous executive salaries and sets term limits for AOC ­directors and its president.

Mr Bertrand, a two-time Olympic sailor and a nationally celebrated figure for his part in captaining Australia’s winning America’s Cup campaign, said Mr Coates had done an “outstanding job in the past’’ but questioned whether he had been in the job for too long.

Writing in The Australian today, Mr Bertrand urges all Olympic sports not to be afraid of change.

The battle for control of the AOC — the first since Mr Coates became its president in late 1990 — is being waged against a backdrop of shrinking Olympic medal tallies, reduced government funding for sport and a feud between the AOC and the Australian Sports Commission. Mr Coates’s spokesman, AOC media director Mike Tancred, ­accused ASC chairman John Wylie of orchestrating the Roche challenge.

Swimming Australia, like all Olympic sports, has two votes in a May 6 ballot to decide who will lead the AOC to the Tokyo Games.

Mr Coates has received public backing from two of his long-time supporters, former AOC president and International Olympic Committee vice-president Kevan Gosper and Graham Richardson, the former federal government minister he installed as Olympic village mayor during the Sydney Games.

Australia fell to 10th on the medal tally in Rio de Janeiro last year, finishing with eight gold medals and 29 overall. At the Games in Sydney in 2000 and Athens in 2004, Australia came fourth on the medal tally, with 16 and 17 gold medals respectively. The Rio medal haul was half the total in Sydney.

Mr Bertrand’s comments are not a formal endorsement of 46-year-old Ms Roche, a former Hockey Australia director and board member of the St Kilda Football Club, but give support to key elements of her reform ­platform.

“Increased success in Tokyo is a challenge for us all and if new leadership at the AOC could help drive this, it should be seriously considered,’’ he writes.

“Although the current chairman has done an outstanding job in the past, his current tenure of 26 years — 30 years, if he is re-elected — is a very long time. Long tenures risk an ingrained culture that is less likely to adapt to change and innovation needed to compete with other nations who have adopted best practice.’’

Mr Bertrand says best practice in business and sport limits the tenure of board members to eight years and board chairs to 12 years.

Ms Roche has pledged to introduce these limits to the AOC, which would bring it into line with the current practice of the IOC executive on which Mr Coates sits as vice-president.

Ms Roche has also called for greater collaboration between the AOC and the ASC, the government agency that provides the majority of funding to Olympic sports. Mr Coates has rejected a proposal by Mr Wylie for a closer working relationship between the two organisations on the grounds that it would undermine the independence of the AOC.

Mr Bertrand said Britain’s success at recent Olympics was a product of carefully targeted funding and “excellent co-oper­ation’’ between the British Olympic Association and the British equivalent of the ASC, UK Sport.

“I am passionate about Australians achieving on the world stage, both in swimming and across all sports,’’ Mr Bertrand writes.

“We need to keep evolving. As such, we should not be afraid in considering change.’’

Under the AOC constitution, voting arrangements favour the incumbent. In addition to the 40 national sport federations having two votes, current members of the AOC executive, two members of the AOC athletes’ commission and Australian IOC members all get a vote.

In the event of a tie, the AOC president has a casting vote.