“I’m feeling very Olympic today”

So with only a few days to go of the London 2012 Olympic Games the verdict is in… The Australian Team has been an absolute, unmitigated catastrophe. With the exception of a few select athletes, the Aussie’s have probably overindulged in the Olympic spirit (and by Olympic spirit I mean the free McDonald’s in the Athletes Village) which has resulted in them underperforming in their respective events.

And with Rio 2016 looming, we need to correct this global injustice that has Australia potentially finishing out of the top 10 on the medal tally. So what do we do now?

Well there’s only one thing for it. Let’s overreact!

We need to implement some radical measures to ensure that this sort of failure, in an arena in which we place so much of our national identity stock, doesn’t happen again.

First of all, we need to get our top mathematicians onto working out the average age of the gold, silver and bronze medalists in every event. Once we have this information, we subtract four from the average age to give us what I am terming “The Medal Age”. The next step is to now search within each sporting discipline to find Australian athletes who are currently at “The Medal Age”. We then focus all of our athletic funding and coaching attention on these specific athletes for the next four years to give them the best chance to bring home the gold, silver or bronze from Rio in 2016. Apologies to any child prodigies or athletes who came to their sport late, according to mathematics, you’re simply not worth the risk.

Next we need the federal government to abandon all of their current international policies and plans to further develop our relationship with China and focus our attention on Brazil. As the next host nation, Brazil currently resides in the seat of sporting power, they can improve or destroy our chances with a simple accommodation allocation within the athletes village, So it is vital that Julia Gillard removes any existing barriers to trade with the South American nation, increase Australia’s foreign investment into Brazil and maybe sets up some sort of ambiguous, ineffective association called Australian Brazilian Besties Association which can be expressed by a catchy anagram, ABBA, which allows our respective leaders to hang out once every six months.

And lastly in order to ensure that our athletes have the necessary isolation and removal from distractions over the next four years in preparation for Rio, Tasmania will be converted into one big institute of sport. Renamed The Australian Island Institute of Sport, the AIIS will become the epicenter for all things Olympic sport in Australia. Only athletes, coaches and administrators will be permitted to live on the island and conjugal visits are strictly prohibited in the hope that athletes will then breed amongst themselves thus creating a generation of super athletes who will then form the nucleus of our 2036 Olympic team.

So there it is, my formula to guarantee Australia’s success at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. And if the above steps don’t work, we should take all of our federal defence funding (cause wars are so 1900) and offer it all to Usain Bolt to switch allegiance to Australia.