"How many potential gold medal winners are herding yaks in the Himalayas? We will never know..."
I sincerely hope you're wrong, Brian.
Personally, I like seeing records broken, especially when record breakers come from 'developing' countries -which I admit, happens too rarely.
This continual improvement is not I think any proof of human evolution (I strongly suspect 'primitive' humans of the past would quite possibly have beaten the pants off modern athletes in some areas, like swinging through the trees...) but rather that more and more humans are given the opportunity to do more than just endure a life dirty, brutish and short.
Let's look forward to the day when every child has the opportunity to excel at whatever talent they happen to have.

Like Brian , I was hopeless at all sports , except swimming [ at which I was mediocre ] . I dreaded sports days [ which , at a Christian Brorhers school, occurred almost every day , as we had to beat the State and Protestant schools ] and , when one missed a catch or failed to tackle an opponent , one was either ridiculed for stupidity or condemned for not trying .

We were constantly told that sport was necessary because it developed character [ whatever that was ] . Those who succeeded at sport were lauded by the teachers and excused their academic failures and misdemeanours .

Even if you were hopeless at playing , you were required to attend sporting events and barrack your team hysterically , though you did not care less whether they won .

Most of the football " heroes " with whom I went to school matured into Rugby League local heroes for a few years after leaving school , then became drunks with cartilage injuries who bored anybody who came near them with tales about their long distant sporting achievements .

Physical fitness is important but it is not necessary for the taxpayers to outlay enormous sums to achieve it . All that is necessary is for people to do a bit of walking or jogging around the block regularly .

Err Brian. I think that you may have missed some of what John Clarke (not Clark) was on about. He is a very skilled satirist/humourist, and anything he says must be looked at from that perspective. He is a superb user of irony. That means that you shouldn't take too seriously what he is saying. I think that he actually is agreeing with you, but in a rather more light hearted manner

Good on you Brian. Unfortunately, it's like the Marlborough man some 50 years ago. The vested interests are still riding their waves.

My own thoughts last week, arising out of one aspect of the London 2012.

Matthew Syed laments the State pressure put upon Chinese athletes. (Have Chinese made a pact with the devil? London 2012, The Australian, August 2) It's laudable, but a little blind to our own surrender to the lures of commercialised sports. If I remember correctly the Olympic Games were in the doldrums until Samaranch climbed on to the commercialization wagon - live television broadcast of the events.
In Australia we have seen one indigenous Australian cricket player, racially taunted by the Indians in a test match in India, but refused backing by our cricket authority to support his complaint to the Indian authority - apparently for fear that that might end the test and bring on the commercial calamities of that eventuality. He seems to have not recovered from that public humiliation because of his race and is no longer part of our cricket team as a consequence.
In another case no effort was spared in the media and among the selectors to get one athlete known for physical violence to his Aussie partner to get to the London 2012 games, as he might win us a medal. We have our own pacts,eh!
Many years ago when my daughters were at school, we came across a family with a daughter good at ... I nearly cried as her unsophisticated father earnestly told us plainly the regime they resorted to to get his young daughter into our National Institute of Sports, away from sunny Brisbane. There were no drugs, nor State pressure. But there must have been something else. If not our sunshine, perhaps our blindness to the god of individual excellence, the lure of family pride in the winner-takes-all religion of our democratic West, and the subliminal urge to join the celebrity train festooned with the corporate stamps of nikes, coca colas, and maccies.
Individual excellence or blind addiction to the opium of our times?

Sory Brian, but when you lost me when you stated

"We have no equivalent of Switzerland's Nestlé , Hoffmann La Roche and Omega. Switzerland is a tiny country with little in natural resources and a population about a third of our own. Obviously Switzerland has got its priorities sorted out more maturely than what we have".

Fact is is the very competitive and ruthless behaviour of Swiss corporations that makes our obsession with sport rather trivial.

Not everyone glows about Swiss corporations.

http://occupywef.ch/wef-corporations-on-the-leash

Given your self-declared lack of a competitive nature, I am surprised you would look to Switzerland as an example to mock Australian sport.

What a sorry lot. You do have my sympathy, it must be dreadful to have never managed to be good at something. I can see by your posts just how soul destroying it must have been to never be good any anything. To have never even aspired to be a winner has left a deep mark on you.

To have shared the expectation of an up coming competition with team mates is something I would not have missed.

You don't really have to be that good to do these things, just competent. When I found I was not a fast enough swimmer to make the school team on summer inter school trips in country NSW, I made it into the debating team. There is usually a way, if you want it.

I did the Sydney Hobart 7 times, not by being a great sailor, but by training myself to be a great navigator. All that needs is some maths & reasoning ability, & enough study to understand what is required to set the best course in different conditions.

The best sales person I ever had didn't do it with high pressure, & world shattering deals with top management. She made friends & spent time with all the counter jumper people, who actually sold the product. With them on our side our success was assured.

There is always a sideways way of getting there, provided you know where there is.