I write this blog now as the Olympics are almost coming to a close. I love the Olympics. I’ve watched it religiously since I was a little girl and yes I will admit that I always imagined standing up on the podium receiving a gold medal and singing proudly to our National Anthem lol! Who didn’t….most children who love sport dream this! It is such a massive achievement to make an Olympic team and compete against the world’s best athletes.

But imagine being on an absolute high, training day in and day out for four years, putting your body through grueling sessions to be prepared for your event. You compete, you try your hardest and it doesn’t pay off. You may not have made the final or you did and you didn’t win a medal or you may have won a silver or bronze! But instead of giving our athletes the recognition they deserve for making it to the Olympics, let alone a final or a medal, the media asks stupid questions like you must be disappointed – when you’ve won a medal??? I can only speak of the Australian media, but it has been so disappointing how negative they have been at times during these games! I agree there are times when our athletes or sporting teams cross a line and do inappropriate things, but when they’ve tried their hardest and don’t get the recognition they deserve it makes me so sad for them.

From criticising swimmers about their weight to making our athletes who win silver or bronze feeling bad they didn’t win gold! I have to ask the question why? Why can’t we embrace a world class event for what it is? I would be so grateful and thrilled that I was good enough to make an Olympic team, a medal would be the icing on the cake. So we’ve not had the best Olympics, in fact as a 32 year old women, this is the least amount of golds I remember us winning in all the Olympics I’ve ever witnessed, but instead of getting behind our athletes we are doing the opposite!

We may not have won a heap of gold medals or were pipped at the line several times for a gold, silver or bronze, but we still did well! We managed an Australian athlete in most finals, came a place in so many events and we have won several golds! Even if we came last in a final, in the whole scheme of things we still did well. I’d love to tell people I made the Olympic final in the 400m running…that would mean I was the 8th best 400m runner in the world…now that’s not bad at all!!! But do we celebrate this enough….I don’t think we do! Too much focus is always spent on finding that story of the person who wins, as much as that is wonderful, it’s nice to hear from athletes who have managed a PB and the excitement and joy they get from that!

Seeing the emotion on Sprenger’s face when he won silver for the 100m breaststroke brought a tear to my eye and channel nine hardly made any fuss over it! Our mens 400m relay team sadly missed the final and instead of giving words of encouragement, a commentator was asking one of our runners are you ready for the criticism you are going to get now you haven’t performed your best? What the? It’s bad enough some of our athletes put so much pressure on themselves, the media doesn’t need to add salt to their wounds!

As a proud Aussie I’d like to stand up and say well done to our Australian Olympic team! You did us proud and we know you will learn from these Olympics and come back stronger than ever in four years time! We can’t be world beaters all the time in our pet events, and we certainly weren’t far off it anyway! But like anything you have to take the good with the bad and as a nation we need to support and congratulate our athletes for representing our country with great pride and dignity…..well most of them anyway:)!!

Aussie Aussie Aussie!!!!!!