Sculpture at Australian Institute of Sport
This morning after we’d restocked our groceries we went to the Australian Institue of Sport. This is the elite athlete training centre for Australia, and it is impressive. They bring their athlete teams here for training. The facilities are excellent, for example the volleyball court is the one used at the Sydney Olympics (they moved it here to Canberra). The track and field facility is a mondo track, and would put our best competition facilities in Canada to shame. The pool is new and state of the art with extensive video cameras, underwater viewing ports, and platforms to monitor the athletes pressure and angle of their feet on the start. They have a dietitian assigned to each sport. It is relatively easy to see why Australia has done so much better than Canada at the Olympic level, given that we basically started from the same point in 1976 at the Montreal Olympics where neither country won any gold medals.
It isn’t very nice weather though, as it is still cloudy, cool and windy. All the Australians are complaining about how cold and wet it is.