London a home away from home for Aussies

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Australian athletes will be right at home at the 2012 Olympics.

When IOC president Jacques Rogge ripped open the envelope and announced the winner in Singapore, the word London was sweet music to Australia’s Olympic movement.

“It’s a very good result for Australia,” said an elated AOC president John Coates.

“The Australian Olympic Committee has long had a very close relationship with the British Olympic Association.

“I think that we’ll be well treated and it’s a city a lot of Australians are familiar with.”

Best of all, it makes the recent decision to set up a European training base for Australia’s Olympians look a very canny one indeed.

The design work is about to begin on the purpose-built facility in the northern Italian town of Varese, at the foothills of the Alps near the Swiss border.

The 50-bed centre is due for completion next year.

It will provide accommodation, sports science and medicine, training facilities, transport, athlete support services and offer storage for bulky equipment such as boats and sails.

The federal government rubber-stamped the plan earlier this year, and the May budget included an $11 million allocation for the centre as part of an overall package of $52.3 million for high performance sports.

The provincial government in Italy has also contributed $8 million towards building costs.

According to AOC secretary general Craig Phillips, the centre will do a lot to nullify the geographic disadvantage that has long hampered Australia’s athletes in Olympic and Commonwealth Games.

And the London decision might also mean it will be expanded over the next seven years.

“I think it’s a great move, and it will be very good for us now that we know with certainty that we’re heading for a Games back in Europe,” Phillips said.

“It’ll also be handy leading into Beijing because a lot of our sports are fairly Eurocentric.

“Over time a number of our sports have developed their own strategies of getting themselves home bases in and around Europe.

“This gives us an opportunity to pull them together and get some economy of scale (for) support services like sport science and sport medicine that they were missing out on.

“It’s a great opportunity for all this to come together.”

Phillips said the base, which is handy to the main airport for Milan and direct flights into London, would also be a great springboard for test events in the leadup to London 2012.

“It will be a home away from home for us,” he said.

Plenty of Australian expertise helped secure the bid, most notably Jim Sloman, whose planning brilliance was instrumental in making the Sydney 2000 Games go like clockwork.

The London bid was largely modelled on the Sydney Games.

Phillips said it was likely that many Australians who worked for the Sydney organising committee SOCOG would find their way into the London team.

NSW Premier Bob Carr said his state would set up a secretariat in London to help coordinate Australia’s contribution to the Games.

Coates said London’s success would ultimately make British athletes more competitive.

“They’re now going to have a London Olympic Institute of Sport on the Docklands site, and they’re going to be a real threat to us in terms of where we rank in the medal tally in 2012, if not 2008,” he said.

In the 2004 Games in Athens, Britain finished 10th on the overall table with 30 medals, nine of them gold. Australia was fourth with 49 medals, including 17 gold.

Australia has already set a target of staying in the top five nations on the medal tally in both Beijing and London.

Olympic bosses weren’t the only Australians beaming at the IOC’s decision in favour of London.

Cathy Freeman and Grant Hackett, who supported the London bid, were ecstatic.