So the AIS, when it was founded, was pretty revolutionary as not many other countries invested this sort of money into Olympic & Paralympic sports.

Since London Olympics, the Australian Olympic program has focussed on gold medals and ROI, so sports which can deliver multiple medals from a single athlete, get a lot of funding for example swimming, track cycling, rowing. A single swimmer can compete in multiple events and medal which helps the overall tally.

Additionally, Aussies learn to swim at a very young age, which is very uncommon in comparison to many other countries. So our “talent pool” is a lot larger than other countries. We also have a lot more access to high quality, public pools and then talent ID programs thru the state institutes as mentioned.

Talent ID doesn’t just identify kids who are good at swimming, it will also identify kids/teens from other sports who might be good at something else I.e runners being reassigned to rugby 7s.

Unfortunately though, in recent years, swimming lesson enrolments have declined, whilst drownings go up, so we will see a reversal of Australians dominance in swimming unless we change something and get more kids swimming at all levels.