Now, that's what you call accountability!

MARTIN Barras was moved from the Australian track cycling sprints coaching duties yesterday and offered a post in their high performance programme. This is as a result of Australia's disaster at the Olympics, where they failed to win a single gold medal after the all-dominating show in Athens four years ago. As reported by AFP here and The Age here. Australia suffered their worst performance in track cycling since Moscow 1980 with a single silver from Anna Meares, when in Athens they went home with no fewer than five gold medals, four from sprint events.
Wow! Look at what he delivered in Athens and how he's had to pay the price for shortfalls on the biggest stage. Which is not the case here in Malaysia.
We have a track endurance coach, who's only claim to fame was a gold medal in the 1970 Asian Games. His archaic techniques have often been criticised and he's constantly failed to deliver results beyond the Sea Games. But okay, the National Sports Council's big guns are his friends, so he gets to stay for as long as he wants and supply bike parts in the hundreds of thousands of ringgit to the NSC.
To note just how bad our endurance squad is at the moment, despite millions of taxpayers money spent, just look at the Olympic results of the individual pursuit. The lower ranked individual pursuit riders were doing about four minutes 18 or 19 seconds plus. Our TEAM PURSUIT (which was far from even qualifying for the Olympics) national record stands at 4:23... something. That's four riders and the time hasn't improved in the past two years.
In the mean time, riders have had to bear the brunt of failures. I've seen the end of a number of careers in my time as a cycling writer. Somehow or rather, the coach is never wrong. Hey, this is Malaysia and we're really, really serious about sport. Of course, because we spend billions!!!