Australian Olympic Team To Work On Values For 2016 Rio De Janeiro Olympic Games

The team culture and values "will be given a higher priority in preparing the 2016 Australian Olympic team, in the wake of "well-publicised disciplinary issues within the once highly successful Australian swimming and cricket teams," according to Nicole Jeffery of THE AUSTRALIAN. The high performance managers of Australia's Olympic sports attended a forum in Sydney Wednesday "to begin planning" for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, but the hot topic quickly "became the need to ensure those athletes in the next Olympic team understood their responsibilities and the behavioural standards required of them." The meeting "called for a set of consistent values to be introduced across all 28 sports." Sailing Performance Dir Peter Conde said that "all teams needed to have the same values." Conde said, "The values need to be elevated into the consciousness of the entire team well before Rio in '16, we need to build on them for the next three years. We need to map them to the Olympic ideals to change behavior" (THE AUSTRALIAN, 3/14).