Senator Kate Lundy, the Federal Minister for Sport, has been warmly welcomed aboard by the Olympic team. 

Well, she would be, wouldn’t she?  She is, after all, the keeper of the purse strings when it comes to funding – paying for people to pursue their dreams, in other words.

But there’s much more to it than that. Lundy is a relatively rare specimen among  the politicians who have occupied this enviable office over the years in that she is an active athlete, even at 45, and her passion for it shines through.  

She’s into cycling and netball but one of her great loves is rowing, which means that if she ever gives up her day job (or has it taken from her, as is often the melancholy fate of politicians of all persuasions) she might end up as the next Chef de Mission of the Olympic Team, a job that has been the exclusive domain of former club-level coxswain John Coates and now dual gold medallist Nick Green for the last two and a half decades.

Sitting beside her at today’s media conference, Green looked suitably chuffed when Lundy revealed that the reason she took up rowing - at the age of 25 and already a mother  –  was because she was inspired by watching him, James Tomkins, Mike McKay and Andrew Cooper win the first of their gold medals at Barcelona in 1992.

Sixteen years earlier, as a child, she had watched the gifted Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci  achieve an unprecedented perfect score of 10 at the Montreal Olympics.

“It had me and my friends performing backward walkovers on the primary school oval for the next three years,” Lundy said.

Her point, then - the philosophy that underpins her decision making – is that sport inspires, and not just the kids, either.  Nowhere is that truer than at the Olympics. 

“There are hundreds of thousands of Australians who can tell a story of inspiration provided by the Olympics,” she said. 

“That’s what its all about. Any justification required for funding is right there in each of those stories. To live a happy, healthy sporting life brings many benefits.”

Coates was not present to hear this but wherever he was, and it wasn’t far away, he might have felt an irresistible urge to clap his hands. It is precisely the message that he, as the long-standing president of the Australian Olympic Committee, has been preaching assiduously in recent years as a debate has raged over the most appropriate way to spend money on public health and fitness.

Lundy plans to try to watch every sport in which Australians will compete, which is all of them except football, fencing and handball, but it’s not all play and no work. She has presented well-received papers on match-fixing and sports governance to a meeting of Commonwealth sports ministers and has been involved in business and economic projects linked to the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Mostly, she isn’t afraid to weigh in as a commentator on the various issues swirling around the team and the Games generally. She let a question about the tribulations of Athletics Australia go through to the keeper, but responded strongly to another about the controversy over the negative media scrutiny on swimmer Leisel Jones, which she said was appalling, unsophisticated, unfair and downright rude.  An apology was in order, she said.

As far as anyone knows, she hasn’t actually been spotted in a boat, training – which hopefully she isn’t going to regret. Following recent tradition, she has bet her British counterpart Hugh Robertson  that Australia will win more gold medals than they do. If she wins, he must don the uniform of the Kookaburras hockey team and dribble a ball around Australia House in central London. If she loses, she puts on a Union Jack shirt and rows a length of the Olympic course.

Naturally, she professes to be confident – but she also acknowledges the obvious, that it isn’t going to be any doddle. 

“We’re going to have to dig deep to beat the UK,” she said. 

“The home team advantage is strong, you can feel it in the air. There are so many sports we are both great at, where margins are the slimmest and anything can happen. I’m quite optimistic.”

So is Green, who said he believed the team was on track to finish top five, but that three sports - sailing, cycling and rowing – would probably determine the winner.

Ron Reed in London

Olympics.com.au