Age of entitlement
Should elite athletes be able to choose when to represent Australia?
THE career span of elite athletes has expanded well beyond what it once used to be with a decade or more on the international stage not unusual.
While fully professional athletes such as NRL and AFL players are remunerated extremely well for their services and should be forced to make themselves available for national teams, elite athletes in Olympic and fringe sports, who are not employed full-time by their national bodies, are fully within their rights to decide not to represent Australia on occasion.
But they do so at their peril. Australia has performed poorly at the world swimming championships compared to any showing over the past
20 years. But the likes of James Magnussen and Cate Campbell would be unable to swim at the Tokyo Olympics, or perhaps even the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, if they were forced to compete this year. Magnussen has been battling shoulder issues and wants to be fully fit for the Gold Coast – although his decision to race overseas this season while bypassing the worlds seemed somewhat strange – while Campbell needed time off to recover from a Rio campaign that battered confidence. But those who have filled the void in their absence have taken advantage. Magnussen and Campbell now have a suite of rivals to face. Indeed athletes that pick and choose risk becoming yesterday’s heroes if the rest of the world passes them by. It’s a risky business. But it is also their choice. FIRST of all, let’s differentiate between being injured and opting out.
One means you can’t complete. The other, you don’t want to.
If your body or mind isn’t up to going to work, no-one will argue.
Then there are the souls who choose not to represent their country.
Swimming may be in the spotlight right now but no-one knows cash over country better than cricketers.
Each year a tidal wave of players hit the IPL, Big Bash, or whatever other T20 incarnation is lining the pockets of the rich. Players all have the aim of landing extra Benjamins, an objective cloaked behind collective claims of “chasing a title”. But this isn’t a forum for attacking cricketers.
What it illustrates, though, is the fact a national cap (in many sports) does indeed have a price tag. That’s where things get murky. Ask a modern athlete and they will say “get while the getting’s good”. An old-timer? “We’d play for free if asked”. Yet there’s symmetry here. What the attitude of the latter does is disrespect all that have come before. And those in the “never will” category. Athletes of 20, 30, 40 years ago didn’t land the pay cheques of today, nor would many of them change that. That’s called honouring selection. Not showing up, obviously, does the opposite of this. Then there are those who will never get the honour. Joe Public would happily don the green and gold in their chosen sport without so much as a bus trip to the venue and postevent snag. So elite athletes can knock back national honours. Just don’t expect too many cheers from Joe Public on the bus.