There’s currently an excellent (and quite balanced) opinion piece by Adele Horin at the Sydney Morning Herald that is quite critical of Australia’s funding of elite sports:

But how much public money is a gold medal worth? In Beijing, each gold medal has cost Australia at least $50 million, says Kevin Norton, a professor of exercise science at the University of South Australia. Or, to put it another way, $12 million came out of the public purse for each medal of any colour. Now we’re told these sums are a pittance compared with what is needed to maintain our ranking in London.

[...]

So it would be a brave politician to resist the calls for more sport funding. But brave they should be. Stephanie Rice made us all proud, but that fleeting feeling came with a $150 million price tag. Politicians may consider that a price worth paying for her three gold medals. It bought sport-mad Australians a lot of pleasure, and that can translate into votes.

I’ll be up-front and admit to watching a small amount of the Olympic coverage—if our public funds are being depleted by this empty nationalism, we may as well get some small enjoyment from it.

But with a crumbling health system and a public education system that desperately needs more attention, not to mention a lack of funding in science and technology—you know, stuff that actually has practical, beneficial applications—we are still happy to blow up to $50 million dollars on just one Olympic gold medal. How can anyone justify this with a straight face?

Between this and the fact that the current host nation is a blatant violator of human rights, are these Olympic Games anything but a complete farce?