It led to the creation of the Australian Institute of Sport.

Amongst western countries, it was ground-breaking stuff.

The nations behind the Iron Curtain had their elite performance factories producing athletes drilled by full-time coaches and fuelled by a range of concoctions better not listed here.

Elsewhere, apart from the well-funded universities' sports programs in the United States, there was nothing much at all in terms of formal structures.

Success was delivered by committed athletes and coaches within competition environments managed by equally devoted volunteers.

The AIS did much to turn Australia's fortunes around - and in pretty quick time. It was initiated with a focus on athletes and coaching. The administration aspects were bare-bones - at one stage essentially only the director - the legendary Don Talbot and his sidekick Peter Bowman.

Fast forward 35 years and the contrast could not be starker - now there's only administration - not an athlete or coach in sight. How did it come to this?

The reasons are myriad but essentially come down to a few key factors.

The first sadly is that sport is a victim of modern governmental and bureaucratic theory. And to be clear it's not a party-political thing - it's driven by new paradigms that apply to anything that's even remotely supported by government funds.

In many areas of government this is logical but in sport it's not because the majority of resourcing across the board is volunteer-based.

Instead of going even close to matching what the base puts in, Australian bureaucratic policy is to impose all sorts of structures and accounting techniques - some of which whittle away the available funds before they have any impact on performance.

How bizarre is it that if as reported $1million of sports funds gets given to another department, in this case, defence, to deliver a supposedly cutting edge program to help our stars be better-prepared for the Tokyo Games.

A good many of our most competitive rival nations take a completely different approach - using military budgets to employ a huge swag of their countries' elite and developing athletes to train full-time as members of their defence forces.

How petty are we?

The second problem is that despite the fact that the AIS was delivering success, the gurus and bean-counters with their hands-on federal government funds and in control of strategic direction became obsessed with mimicking what was going on in Great Britain.

That approach was flawed from the outset.

For a start, British elite sport was largely funded by a lottery system that did not rely on ministerial decisions being made about how much money should be allocated to sport.

But far crazier was that the British system had largely copied what Australia had been doing - but without the AIS having a guaranteed funding source.

Interestingly, British elite sport is now widely regarded as being chaotic - because of the weird direction taken by their leaders after their huge successes in their home Olympics in London in 2012.

No wonder the AIS is now so fundamentally different from its glory days.

Because there is no sign of sport on campus - it's easy for the bean-counters to seize the moment and propose a sell-off of facilities and spare land.

Hopefully, former sports minister Rod Kemp's review of the AIS will call out this nonsense and demand a return to something that works.

There are too few sports facilities across the country. Even fewer of them are accessible to both the grassroots and the elite on a regular basis.

Talking about letting even one of them go to build a car park is devastating.

It's only necessary to look at the rapid demise of elite track and field in Melbourne since its headquarters were demolished by a state governmental whim which relocated it to an inferior site that is in turn way too often unavailable.

But most of all sport policy in Australia has failed because it has disrespected the volunteer base which drives 90 per cent of sport delivery in Australia.

However large the bureaucracy believes its outlays for sport might be, it pales into insignificance compared to the value of the voluntary contribution.