Aussie Sportsmanship: Tamsyn Lewis accuses everyone who beats her of cheating before the race…

So your going to the Olympics. You’ve spent your whole life training, missing out on all the fun that other kids had growing up because you were concentrating on being the best of the best.
You’ve worked hard and risen up through the ranks to become a world class athlete, overcoming innumerable challenges and injuries along the way.
And then, a week before you actually set foot on the Olympic track, you publicly accuse all other competitors of being “drug cheats”… And not just because you’re going to lose.
You’re Tamsyn Lewis, Australia’s most bikini-modelling, catfight-publicising Institute of Sport product to ever come 7th in a race.
So just how the hell has the rest of the world gotten the idea that Australians are terrible sports and tend to take a little too seriously the things that other countries call GAMES.

For a country that spends very nearly as much on sport as it does on its military, we certainly know where the priorities are.
Just check out the table below showing the various Olympic team sizes as a proportion of their countries population:
| USA | AUSTRALIA | UK | GERMANY | CHINA | INDONESIA | |
| Population | 304,810,285 | 21,386,542 | 60,587,000 | 82,220,000 | 1,321,851,888 | 234,693,997 |
| # of Athletes going to Beijing |
596 | 433 | 312 | 436 | 639 | 24 |
| % of population in 2008 team |
0.0196% | 0.2025% | 0.0515% | 0.0530% | 0.0048% | 0.0010% |
As you can see, Australia takes the Olympics and sport more than 10 times as seriously as the Americans and more than 200 times as seriously as Indonesia.
And people call us backward…
Tags: AIS, Cheats, Olympics, Sport, Sportsmanship, Steroids, Tamsyn Lewis









November 6th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Good post.
January 29th, 2010 at 2:17 am
I was reading something else about this on another blog. Interesting. Your perspective on it is diametrically opposed to what I read in the first place. I am still reflecting over the different points of view, but I’m inclined heavily toward yours. And no matter, that’s what is so great about contemporary democracy and the marketplace of ideas online.