Jenna Price | Money spent on AIS, Olympics could have greater benefits elsewhere

I watch sport as enthusiastically as I watch The Bear or Only Murders in the Building or, shhh, Masterchef (vale Jock Zonfrillo and good work on keeping it all together, Melissa Leong).

But this sportsmania can't go on. As our own Karen Barlow reported this week, the federal government has announced an independent review of the Canberra-based Australian Institute of Sport. And here's the $1 billion question? Should it stay in Canberra? Should the AIS move to south-east Queensland?

Should we really be spending this kind of money on sporting facilities when we can't even fund dental in Medicare? Quick reminder: no matter what you think about funding elite sport, you know in your heart that the trickle-down impact is fleeting. We love winners - but if the only winners are the elite athletes and our momentary bouts of nationalistic Oi-Oi-Oi, is that enough?

Should we be investing money in feel-good when there is far greater need for do-good?

Earlier this year, I interviewed Victor Matheson, a US professor of sports economics and the author of The Economics of Sports. He is completely opposed to big spending on sporting facilities. He told me public financing for sporting facilities has somewhere between zero to little impact on local economies. But when we are talking about the AIS, it's not just the sporting facilities which come with it but the place for the bureaucracy which administers elite sport in this country.

As the AIS will tell you itself, it "leads and enables a united and collaborative high performance sport system that supports Australian athletes to achieve international podium success".

Awesome. Love it. But should we all be paying for it?

In some respects, watching elite sport is entirely the same as watching elite entertainment. And if we think about how elite entertainers learn to strut their stuff, they do it places where they have to pay. Universities, TAFEs, private colleges.

We might pay for the building of those institutions but those who attend have to pay too. And - if they earn enough, they pay it back through higher education contributions.

That seems fair. Our elite athletes get a lot from the public funding of elite sport. In 2016, Anna Grace wrote her PhD on elite athletes - we train them to embody success.

They get to keep that embodiment and profit from it after their elite careers are over. And, here's the thing, each and every Olympic medal costs $11 million. I'm thinking about how else we could spend that money. They get to keep their success. And we don't.

A couple of years back, a bunch of European researchers got together to analyse whether funding elite sport had any impact - they could see that nations across the world increasingly invested large amounts of public money to bring us athletic heroes.

Veerle De Bosscher, Simon Shibli and Jens De Rycke wrote: "Policymakers often claim that elite sport will not only lead to more medals, but it will also trigger a range of wider societal outcomes."

But when they reviewed all the studies, they discovered that if you are looking for real outcomes, any purported evidence is "largely fragmented and anecdotal ... causality on this topic is still difficult to establish".

As part of their research, they also interviewed high-performance directors. Of course they said funding elite sport led to positive outcomes. Of course they did.

Plus research into possible negative outcomes struggles to get funded, say these researchers. Yeah, even this year in Australia, one excellent sports researcher wouldn't talk about one of his findings because he feared it would impact possible future funding.

In 2012, after Australia's less-than-stellar performance at the London Olympics, I wondered how athletes were allowed to get away with doing badly. Oooh, the trouble that caused.

But the facts have not changed. We are meant to feel sorry for athletes who do not complete the job they are charged with doing. Occasionally, you will get an athlete who will stand up and take responsibility for their failures. Mostly, they have a weep and a whine, proclaiming they "don't know where it all went wrong".

If we tried that in our usual workplaces, we'd be put on a performance program. Our failures would not be outsourced for others to take responsibility.

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If this is professional sport of any kind at any level, then those involved need to take responsibility for results. And maybe the AIS should release an annual report, a kind of cost-benefit analysis, of what athletes (and their coaches and their trainers and the bureaucrats in charge) cost and what they've achieved while they are on the public purse.

While I understand that there is no need to ever talk about Daniel Andrews, the former premier of Victoria, ever again, let's recognise that cancelling the Commonwealth Games was the right thing to do.

The best option would be for Australia, collectively, to recognise that we need to spend less money on elite sport. We need to spend more money on grassroots sport.

More money on making sure anyone over 65 is at tai chi or pilates or aquarobics. That's where there is a definite societal impact (stronger old people cost less money because they spend less time in hospital).

Spend it on toddler gyms. Fund swimming lessons for every five year old in the country (four being the age at which it is first truly possible to get the hang of the thing) until they can actually swim. And then make sure they can still swim when they are 13.

I love sport. I'd miss it if I didn't get to see it. I'm as excited as anyone when we win medals or trophies or premierships or whatever.

But it's not - and should never be - the main game. And when we are thinking about spending a billion bucks on the AIS, think about where that money could really be spent to have the best outcome for all of us.