There was one Australian team at the Athens Olympics quite happy to avoid the headlines, for which anonymity was the equivalent of a gold-medal performance. In 2004, the support services, organised through the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), were largely invisible except to the people who mattered — the athletes, coaches and officials who were in need of them. Those needs went far beyond the obvious areas of treating injury or massaging sore muscles. Athletes did not sit down to breakfast or sip a drink on the training track without depending on the meticulous planning and attention to detail that mostly began two years before the Olympics and, in some cases, is in perpetual motion.
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