News Hit

DISCLAIMER: This leak is completely fictitious and is not supposed to be taken literally, seriously or orally.

Last year there was considerable amount of controversy surrounding the high-tech new swimsuits that many nations were buying for their swim teams to use at the Beijing Olympics. Designed by NASA and costing $550 each, Speedo's LZR (pronounced laser) suits led to a spate of world records being broken. It was alleged that they gave swimmers such an edge in the water that they were akin to technological doping. Furthermore, they made life difficult for swimmers from poorer nations, who had to rely purely on their swimming talent to win medals.

Unfortunately, even with the added edge that our swimmers were given by these new suits, Australia's medal tally was rather woeful. For the first time in years, we lost to Britain. Australia's failure in the (medal) pool plunged the key players at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) into a deep depression. In one fell swoop, Australia's national self-esteem was dashed.

After almost a year of agonised soul-searching the head of Research and Development at the AIS, Dr Bernard Moreau, re-emerged last week and distributed amongst top sporting officials this memo, in which he outlines his modest proposals to get Australia's swimming team back on schedule for a 2012 whitewash in London.

NewsHit received this memo from a trusted source within the AIS, and we are indebted to her (or perhaps him) for the information.

FROM THE DESK OF DR BERNARD MOREAU

HEAD OF BIO-MECHANICAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT AT THE AIS

Now that the Beijing Games are but a fading memory, I think we can all agree that now is the time to start thinking about how we as a country will prepare for the next Olympics, London 2012. To begin with we must confront the unpleasant truth - yes, Australia had a disastrous Olympics, the worst ever. If we were living in any other country our useless medal-dodging athletes would have faced a firing squad by now; and yet, we’ve met their return with self-conscious indifference. For the first time in my life I am ashamed to call myself an Australian.

It is the negligence of the previous government which has gutted Australian sport. After the spectacle of the 2000 Sydney Olympics the Howard politburo completely lost interest in the Games. Howard thought that by marginally increasing sports funding by an infinitesimal amount (15%) each year he would be able to placate us, but we were still subsisting on a shoestring and staff morale was at its lowest ebb. Nine years have elapsed since the Sydney Games and our sporting infrastructure is in desperate need of rejuvenation: some of our buildings are over five years old and the white lines of the parking spaces are beginning to fade. We had hoped that Kevin Rudd would bail us out, but on the basis of his year-and-a-half in office we’re convinced that he is too busy jetting around the world, mulling over the so-called economic crisis, re-thinking climate change and taxing alcopops to care about Australian sport.

Even if Rudd does decide to resuscitate the AIS, I fear that it might already be too late to fully rectify the damage that has been done to our country’s reputation – both here and overseas. It is an absolute tragedy, and the insincere "it’s not about winning" speeches and the "our athletes did well and we should be proud of them" platitudes of last September only highlight this defeatist attitude. If this keeps up we risk losing our sense of self-respect. We don’t want to see ourselves reflected in a bunch of failures. That would be a complete betrayal of the heroic ANZAC spirit.

Therefore, we shouldn’t let one complete and utter disaster demoralize us for too long. Let us not forget that we still have over three years until Britain, and in that time we could ensure that our 2012 batch of athletes will be going to the Games totally prepared. This means we must first be open to new and innovative training techniques.

I have a few modest proposals of what should be done to best prepare us for London 2012. I know that many of my ideas were erroneously labelled ‘unethical’, ‘evil’ and ‘very evil and unethical’ by my critics, but that was before Beijing, at a time when our confidence in our athletes was absolute and when we believed that they were destined for greatness. Times have changed, and if we, as a country, are to survive as a sporting power into the new century then we will have to thoroughly re-think our approach to winning medals.

RESTRUCTURE THE AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE OF SPORT

First, the AIS needs to purge itself of all those athletes that didn’t win gold in Beijing. Let’s face it, most of us didn’t even want to see them again - that’s why we made the silver and bronze medallists fly back on a Qantas flight. Yet, by some insane coincidence, their plane managed to make it all the way to Sydney intact, without breaking up over Sumatra.

As for the subhuman specimens that were too inept to even procure a lousy bronze - they were told to hitchhike their way back to Australia by themselves. At the time of writing, none of these four hundred and six athletes have made it back into the country, and nobody within the community has commented on their being missing. A few of these ‘athletes’ did attempt to sneak back into Australia, but they were fortuitously intercepted and are now waiting for their papers to be processed on Christmas Island.

Even friends and family members of the ‘athletes’ have been keeping silent, and are said to be relieved that their honour will not be besmirched by being associated with known failures. It is my sincere hope that matters will remain this way.

RECONSIDER OUR STANCE ON BANNED SUBSTANCES

Secondly, we need to re-think our approach to the role of drugs in sport. To begin with, this means that we should stop trying to develop new performance enhancing drugs. They have been a pox on the Olympic Games for decades now, and even though developed countries have channelled billions of dollars into developing new, near-undetectable steroids, the IOC boffins have always managed to stay one step ahead of the competition. The screening techniques utilised by the IOC are all but infallible, and no new drugs have been able to make it past their defences for over a decade.

Attempts were made to create special steroids, which were infused with additional concoctions that sought out and killed the IOC’s screening compounds, but even then we underestimated the potency of what we were up against. Without going into detail, all the Federal Government needs to know is that this triggered a chemical arms race between the anti-screener agents already inside the athletes’ bodies and the IOC’s own anti-anti-screener enzymes, which in turn led to athletes mutating into Lovecraftian monstrosities hell-bent on destruction, which in turn led to the destruction of several expensive Sports Science facilities.

As a result, the impasse between the drugs manufacturers and the IOC testers has reached the point wherein the banned substances list includes practically every single chemical compound in existence. As it stands, the only way that an athlete can be certain that they won’t test positive for performance enhancing drugs is to subsist entirely on a diet of boiled lentils, distilled water and roasted arsenic flakes in the weeks leading up to their drugs screening.

As it would be impossible for us to formulate a steroid that could avoid detection, it makes the most sense for us to channel our efforts into other forms of chemical enhancement. What we should be doing is thinking laterally. Instead of wasting our time developing new drugs, we should be coming up with new ways of administering the old ones.

I have been told that it would be possible to implant our swimmers with synthetic organs which autonomously release steroids directly into the bloodstream. Furthermore, these steroid producing organs could be engineered to look like a spleen or pancreas, and then substituted for the ‘real’ organ without anyone even noticing. Just imagine: a mock pancreas which, instead of insulin, releases concentrated doses of anabolic steroids on demand. The benefits are obvious.

Although this improvement would give our athletes a much-needed edge, I don’t see how it could be construed as cheating. The ability to swim really fast is partly determined by our genes anyway, and if someone is born with extra long feet we don’t bar them outright for having an unfair physical advantage. That is how sport works. If everyone was equally matched physically it would not be much of an Olympics. (It would be a Communist Olympics, and everyone would be made to accept poor-quality lead medallions or risk being whisked off to a gulag).

If we say that our entire Olympic swimming team was simply born with steroid secreting pancreases… well, then the IOC can hardly prove or disprove it. Even if they suspect something, they can’t do anything because we could accuse them of discriminating against our freakishly gifted swimmers. Besides, genes don’t decide everything (yet), and there isn’t a gene which determines true-blue Aussie courage, a strong ticker and a gutload of ANZAC spirit (though we are looking for it and we hope to have it isolated soon).

INTEGRATED STREAMLINING SOLUTIONS

Third, get rid of the NASA Speedos. They were a cute idea, but getting rocket scientists and astrophysicists to design swimming trunks was always doomed to fail. It would have been a lot more productive if the money had been poured into more worthy sciences like biotech or robotics; the sciences that rebuild the swimmer, not the swimsuit.

Not to be cruel, but NASA’s crusty stargazers are basically relics of the last millennium. Yes, they put a man on the moon but it is not as if though they have done anything noteworthy since then. Getting NASA to design a swimsuit was akin to consulting an astrologer, a phrenologist or a neo conservative – a good idea a decade ago, but times have changed.

With the right amount of funding we could slowly graft a neoprene patina directly onto the athlete’s dermis, in effect replacing their oily, spongiform, human blubber with sleek, streamlined and waterproof sharkskin. We set the trend with the ‘Mean Team’ in the 1980s, so we might as well take the next logical step and shave off the next most burdensome layer. Obviously this would be an incredibly costly and painful procedure, but imagine the calibre of swimmer it would produce!

CRANIAL TOPIARY

But replacing the swimmer’s skin is only the beginning. My fourth suggestion is that, in order to truly revolutionize our athlete’s performances in the pool, we must reconstitute their entire bodies. The human body is a wondrous thing, but there are so many bits that aren’t needed for swimming.

Take for instance, the brain. Our brains only function at 10% of their full capacity, and it has been proven that only 3% of the brain is needed to co-ordinate swimming from one side of a pool to the other. The rest is excess baggage. Therefore, for my fourth suggestion, I propose that we treat our swimmers to a bit of cranial topiary. Not only will the procedure offload dead weight, but it will also make athletes easier to control.

In order to coordinate rapid movement through water, the brain need only understand a simple set of commands. In swimming this programming basically amounts to ‘swim in a straight line until you touch the wall, then turn one-hundred and eighty degrees and swim back the way you came until you are back at where you started, and then repeat x amount of times until the race is over’. It’s so easy that we’ve succeeded in training goldfish to swim the 800m breaststroke. Now all we have to do is adapt the goldfish training program for our improved human swimmers and we should be well on our way to gold in London come 2012.

Other than the cognitive centres of the brain, which allow for an efficient swimming motion, the only part of the brain that needs to be retained is the lower region of the brain stem. It is this area that that produces elementary emotional responses in humans. In particular, this part of the brain generates the sensations we recognised as ‘fear’ and ‘anger’.

The pundits say that our athletes are single-minded in their pursuit of gold, and they are half right. Over the years we have already managed dispel from their minds the notion that their efforts somehow benefit the country. Obviously this is an absurd delusion if ever there was one - completely at odds with the spirit of the Games – but the fact that we were able to prevent it from distracting them speaks volumes. And this was only through gradual indoctrination. By taking the next step and reconfiguring our athletes at an anatomical level, we will be able to rear athletes that are literally focused on nothing else but their own personal glory in the pool.

Of course this does require large amounts of funding, as the athlete needs to be fed, clothed and watered, things that they are ill equipped to do themselves. On top of this they also need to be indulged constantly so that they are cosseted enough to believe that nothing else matters apart from their own success. As a result we need to employ full-time carers to supervise our future swim-stars, partially for the athlete’s own welfare but also for the safety of the community, as the qualities which drive them on in the pool often make them ill-suited to social settings.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to afford full-time supervisors and as expected this government-sanctioned negligence wrought havoc on our Beijing prospects. (One suggestion is that carers are re-routed from elderly and/or disabled charges to ill-adapted swimmers. This makes perfect logical sense. After all, old people have only an infinitesimal chance of winning a gold medal and nobody cares about the Special Olympics). The regrettable injuries inflicted on Simon Cowley could easily have been averted if a supervisor had been there to tranquilise the offending swimmer at the first sign of trouble.

The practice of cranial topiary is much maligned, unjustly so in my opinion, and if we were to look beyond the populist arguments against it, I think people would come to understand the benefits of the approach. The ALP will also be pleased to know that the athletes will still be able to pursue careers in state politics once it is no longer expedient for us to retain them as swimmers. So too would advertisers, who will be pleased to know that lobotomised athletes can still be used to plug goods and services.

Even with 90% of their brain-mass missing, reconstituted athletes can still be posed and told to smile on command whenever they held up a product, although any interested parties may need to apply several years in advance. That way, our training institutions can teach our athletes the subtleties of holding cereal boxes up to the camera, unwrapping muesli bars and picking up a Weetbix with a spoon. However, this also needs proper funding (which costs money too) and if we don’t get more of it soon we will not be able to provide any marketable athletes, which, could well destroy the economy of this country.

PERMANENT REPRODUCTIVE ORGAN DISPLACEMENT AND MAMMARICAL DEVOLUTION

Fifth – we must remove or reshape all naughty bits. Clearly, the reproductive organs are of absolutely no use to swimming. In men the testes admittedly do provide some impetus towards a competitive edge but this can be augmented with hormone therapy. The protruding genitals inhibit movement and cause unpleasant chafing. If these were removed the swimmer would be able to swim around a lot more freely and certainly would not be distracted by their carnal urges.

The same goes for the breasts. In women they disrupt the centre of gravity and make swimming incredibly difficult. Through techniques gleamed from the Burmese Kayan peoples, we could theoretically mould the breasts into wedge-shaped ‘fins’. Not only would this make our female swimmers more streamlined, but by waggling them in perfect time, they could foreseeably operate as a secondary propulsion system. It could well prove just the edge they need in the pool.

These enhancements might seem a little over-zealous, but rest assured, they are a necessity in the current sporting climate. What successive governments have failed to understand is that we are nearing the point where World and Olympic records are decided by ten thousandths of a second – and so mathematically, we have to be mindful that even the slightest tweak can prove decisive.

Removal of these parts could shave that extra, burdensome thousandth of a second off most athletes’ times, which, although it doesn’t sound like much, when you consider the orders of chronology that we are referring to, it is like expecting a normal swimmer to compete with one who has two bowling balls and a pantomime dachshund strapped to his groin. Believe me, I’ve tried it and it is practically impossible to stay afloat, let alone get from one side of the pool to another in anything vaguely approaching competitive time – irrespective of the dachshund’s swimming ability.

However, these initiatives obviously do affect the marketability of our athletes. It is, for example, doubtful that Ralph or FHM would countenance images of our reconstituted female athletes gracing their covers. Dancing with the Stars is also completely out of the question, unless Channel Seven agrees to produce a special underwater series (and even then, dance steps involving more complicated instructions than ‘swim up and down the pool x number of times’ are untenable).

However, Western standards of what constitutes beauty are notoriously fickle, so it might well transpire that bald, shark-skinned freaks become the next “in” trend in the fashion industry.

The removal of certain organs also has certain secondary benefits. Sports coaches are notorious for having something of a propensity to, shall we say, tamper with their young charges, and this could also be neatly overcome if steps were taken to remove the offending body parts.

Ensuring that the athletes cannot reproduce under normal circumstances is also beneficial from a national security perspective. We live in perilous times and we have to understand that some countries – our sworn enemies, those who seek to destroy our way of life and everything we stand for – like Britain - might want to pilfer our top athletes and initiate forced breeding programs in order to destroy Australian morale. Our modifications would preclude such a scenario from being strictly possible.

Likewise it would reduce the workload of ASIO and the AFP, which are already unfairly burdened with watching over future sports stars (like Jana Rawlinson’s baby – because of its pedigree, that kid has limitless potential) to monitor kidnap attempts. I am not exaggerating when I say that these potential champions need constant security – as much as John Howard would require if he ever attempted to prance through a Socialist Alliance meeting in his green and gold tracksuit.

A PR OFFENSIVE

Sixth – we must do more to glamourise our swimmers. In recent years the public seems to have lost interest in them. We must investigate the drivers of this troubling social change, and ask ourselves: why do Australian parents no longer want to push their kids into becoming our future swim stars. Surely it can't be the lack of financial incentives or the lascivious swim coaches. We're at a loss to explain it.

The lack of motivation among children to become professional swimmers is not a problem and it never has been. What we are now seeing is parents losing the will to drill their offspring up into our future champions. The only way that this malaise can be addressed is to encourage the media to canonise our swimmers once more, and showcase them as the people who make this country what it is.

GLOBAL STRATEGIES

Seventh - The Government has to understand that the procurement of Gold Medals is now a globalised undertaking. No longer do our Olympic efforts play out in isolation.

That is why I am suggesting that Australia should annex Jamaica. Already, a number of other nations are eyeing up Jamaica for its natural resources (i.e. sprinters). The United States, Russia, Iran and Switzerland have already started planning their offensives. We must strike now and take Jamaica for ourselves. Usain Bolt is in the country at the moment, so it is the perfect time to forcibly convert him into an Australian citizen.

Besides, it would not be the first time one country coveted another country’s athletes and decided to invade. Russia has been doing it for years: Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1962, Afghanistan in 1980 – once the Cold War ended we thought that was the end of it, but then they tried to claim South Ossetia as the Olympics were beginning last year, along with South Ossetia's famous women's table-tennis team.

Already, sections of our government are planning our long-term Olympic medal strategies on a global scale. For example, factories in gimps have been pumping out greenhouse gas, solely for the purpose of flushing out the Solomon Islands and claiming their young gymnastics prodigies. We even considered sending Alexander Downer to Cyprus to convince the local Cypriot hurdlers to immigrate to Australia. With any luck, these measures will soon be paying dividends.

CLOSING STATEMENTS

In closing, without fear of hyperbole, I think I can say that our lacklustre sporting performance in recent years is easily the biggest crisis affecting Australia today, and could well be the biggest crisis in our country's history.

We need to win more medals in London; the consequences for all Australians will be dire if we don't. Fortunately, I have laid out all the solutions. They will be a tad expensive to execute, but it will certainly be worth it in the end.

All that I require to restore Australia's self-esteem is for all federal funding was directed away from such pointless frivolities as education, defence, arts and health and channelled directly into where it matters – sport. For too long these pointless drains on government resources have retarded this proud nation’s potential and led to us being wholeheartedly derided on the world stage. Also, Kevin Rudd should be informed that if we were to win more Gold medals at the next Olympics, a permanent spot on the UN Security Council would be all but guaranteed.

However, other countries have already started considering such programs so we don’t want to get behind. All that I require is a mere 35% of the Federal budget and I shall be able to guarantee us a slew of gold medals at the 2012 Olympics.

Let's not forget that Britain - or oldest and deadliest enemy - is doing its utmost to prepare for the 2012 Games. They are giving their athletes a ‘fair go’, so why can’t Australia - the land of the fair go - do the same? Let our elite athletes have some extra money to prove themselves. It is more important that we send a message to the rest of the world that we Australians can swim up and down a rectangular body of water x amount of times better than anyone else.

It is too integral to our national character to have it taken away, by Britain of all countries.