Did not qualify. Last. Sixth. Did not qualify. Did not qualify. Last. Fifteenth.

If you saw the look on the faces of the SBS presenters, including Jane Flemming and Les Murray, during the closing ceremony of the Athletics Championships in Osaka you would know what I was talking about. It looked like something had dropped on them from a great height and it wasn’t gold.

The Australian athletics team delivered what is probably one of the worst performances at an international meet in recent memory and we are now only eight months out from the Beijing Olympics.

The Australian Sports Commission, the Federal Government’s agency responsible for implementing the national sports policy released figures that showed that the Australian taxpayer spent $6.3 million on athletics in the last financial year.

More than $580,000 was spent specifically for the lead up to the Osaka meet which was to allow “medal-potential athletes and their coaches to spend more time in Europe for valuable training and competition in the all-important European Grand Prix circuit events”.

It’s no wonder that the SBS commentary team was totally lost for words.

It appears that many other commentators are also lost for words. Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair and Piers Akerman who are always quick to condemn failures in the arts sector have been deathly silent about the abysmal failure of the athletics squad.

As recently as June, Tim Blair led a scathing attack on arts funding in NSW by suggesting that if the health sector is in such a bad shape, maybe they should apply for arts funding grants.

“Health department needs a big slice of this action. It should be easy enough; application forms are available online and Arts NSW has lots of cash to throw around,” he said in The Daily Telegraph.

Blair has also made consistent attacks on performing arts groups, such as Circus Monoxide, a troupe that travels around regional NSW entertaining kids and families referring to the performers as “creatively unemployable”.

Bolt has similarly condemned publicly funded arts programs, most notably the Melbourne International Arts Festival and Piers Akerman consistently takes aim at the ABC.

Central to all of their arguments is that “your” dollar is being wasted and that any failure by artists or arts organizations is wasteful. This is surely remarkable double standards by commentators such as Blair, Bolt and Akerman.

Imagine the contempt they would have for Opera Australia, the Sydney Theatre Company or any other arts organization if performers gave the same excuses as the athletes did in Osaka.

Australia’s best sprinter, Josh Ross was reported to have been afflicted by homesickness, depression and was too fragile to compete at his best and ended up coming home early without any success.

Other athletes used similar excuses of not having done enough preparation or hadn’t done the right preparation. If an opera singer in any major Opera Australia production had been in a similar predicament and suddenly sung off key due to a “lack of preparation” abuse would be hurled at them from audiences, it would be critically slammed by the mainstream media and commentators would be quick to draw blood.

The Australian public expects a lot of our professional sports men and women and many of us share the highs and lows without a hint of antagonism towards the public sponsorship which aims for excellence on the world stage.

If the attacks by commentators on artists or arts organizations were placed on agencies such as the Australian Institute of Sport, they would quickly face the wrath of the Australian public. Somehow, abusing artists is an easier point scoring tactic but it’s no more justified.