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Good News Week

Olympic Doom (GNW 16/11/09: What’s The Story?)

The Australian Olympic Committee has expressed frustration at the delay in response to its huge additional funding request.  If they were in charge, it would be swifter, higher, richer!

If an Olympics were held this year, Australia would slip to seventh on the medal tally.  Seventh!  We may as well just swallow hemlock. / We may as well commit mass hiri-kiri. / And we get depressed when we score silver! / That’s not even bronze – that’s cardboard.

It wouldn’t be so bad, but we’d be behind Britain! NOOOO!

Then again, we could just play ironically. / play for the wooden spoon.

And what’s worse, the 2012 Olympics are in London. They’re even going to outbarrack us! Quick – we need funding to send over five million fans!

The Australian Olympic Committee is asking for an extra $108 million per year for the next ten years. Didn’t anyone tell them we’re in a global financial crisis? / It’s called the “where’s our stimulus package” plea.

Unfortunately investing in athletes doesn’t give the greatest returns. Sure, they win gold medals, but no matter how much cash we plough into them, they all get redundant pretty quickly.
Without a billion dollars more funding, the Olympic Committee say that we may never again see the giddy heights of the 2000 and 2004 Olympics, when we were fourth on the medal tally.  Us Aussies, we just love coming fourth. / And surely a billion dollars is well worth it to come fourth. / Remember those days: Go Australia!  Almost bronze-ish!

If the government doesn’t cough up an extra billion dollars, perhaps we can ask the athletes who took advantage of all the previous funding to chip in a couple of their Uncle Tobys cheques.
We’d better prop up investment in sports quick smart. If we don’t get world-class athletes now, you know what that means for Australia’s future: no commentators. / nobody to endorse Uncle Tobys.

We’d better prop up investment in sports quick smart. If we don’t get world-class athletes now, people might start playing sports just for fun! / for fitness and recreation!

Unless there’s a massive injection of cash, we’re going to have to find people willing to swim for free.

It’s a tragedy.  If this keeps up, soon some people will have to play sports because they enjoy it.
Part of the problem is people taking up extreme and fringe sports. So enough of the lacrosse, losers – learn to bat or swim now or the country’s doomed!

Part of the problem is people taking up extreme and fringe sports. So more cricket and swimming, and less synchronised bungee-snorkling. / less dwarf-tossing. / less waterbilliards.

But without our domination of sports… we’ve got nothing to offer the world.

We’ve always been like the dumb kid at the back of the class who the school will never expel because he’s great at inter-school sports. But now the other schools are winning, and it’s just a matter of days before we’re going to be called to the principal’s office one last time…

Okay, so we suck at sports. But we still invented the Hills Hoist! Wanna dry some clothes? We’re your country! Anyone?

Okay, so we suck at sports. But when they make boozing up, chucking sickies, and complaining about having no rain Olympic sports, WE SHALL RETURN TO GLORY! / victory shall be OURS!

Okay, so currently we suck at sports. But you wait until blackface impersonation is accepted into the Olympics!

Oh no! We’re not very good at sports anymore! We might have to spend some of that money on, you know, something important!

According to the Australian Olympics Committee, we’re not spending enough money on sports. And according to the Australian Comedians Guild, the Farmers’ Union, and the National Cabal of Fruitmongers, we’re not spending enough on comedy, farming, or fruit-related infrastructure.

According to the Australian Olympics Committee, we’re not spending enough money on sports. Although it’s still quite a lot to spend on a handful of people who really like recreational activities. / quite a lot to spend so a handful of people can show off how good they are at playing games.

Of course, it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at it if it turns out we’re just a nation of LOSERS.

But let’s face it, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on sports if you’re just not very good at it.

They’ve asked for an extra 108 million dollars a year to help train our young sportspeople. And young musicians and artists have asked if they can have an extra 5 bucks added to their dole.

And it’s not just the Olympics.  In cricket, rugby, tennis, golf, all our world-beaters seem to have disappeared.  But we were first out of the recession, so we’ll just have to beat our chests about economic management.  Hooray.

England have plunged millions into sports leading up to the London Olympics.  Sure, they’ll have 40 percent unemployment for the next decade, but at least they’ll have the Ashes.

But, last Olympics, we had 435 people in the team, so we need at least $200,000 per year – extra – for each one.  And if we spend four trillion dollars per year we could ALL run a bit faster.

So that’ll be over 200 million bucks per year to pay for around 400 athletes. The other 21 million of us will just have to try harder.

Surely 200 million bucks per year is a small price to pay to make 0.002% of the population slightly better at sport.

It really sends the wrong message to children. They’re going to grow up thinking sports is about fun and fitness, instead of medals and endorsements.

Australia’s 4th at the cricket? Bring on global warming – I want to die.

By Wok and Mat

Warwick Holt and Mat Blackwell are long-time writing partners, who created the mega-award winning web series Bruce, and wrote loads of jokes for TV shows including Good News Week, The Sideshow and The Glass House. Several years of their raw material for those shows is posted right here on this blog.

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