Australia has low expectations of being a clever country yet high expectations of producing Olympic gold medallists. Before extra funds are poured into the Olympics arms race leading up to 2012, maybe it's time to rethink our sources of national pride. Don't get me wrong: I like watching sport. I live with sport fanatics. I understand the tribal feeling that sets hearts racing when Australia wins a medal. Even in such peripheral sports as softball, which I last encountered in primary school, my patriotic heart swells with pride as we hit a home run.

But how much public money is a gold medal worth? In Beijing, each gold medal has cost Australia at least $50 million, says Kevin Norton, a professor of exercise science at the University of South Australia. Or, to put it another way, $12 million came out of the public purse for each medal of any colour. Now we're told these sums are a pittance compared with what is needed to maintain our ranking in London. Australians, more than most, derive enormous pride from our national sporting achievements. Of 34 countries surveyed in 2004 by the International Social Survey Program, we ranked third - behind Venezuela and New Zealand - for our sense of pride in sporting achievements. In the US, democratic credentials, political influence, military power and scientific achievements were more important sources of pride than sport. So it would be a brave politician to resist the calls for more sport funding. But brave they should be. Stephanie Rice made us all proud, but that fleeting feeling came with a $150 million price tag. Politicians may consider that a price worth paying for her three gold medals. It bought sport-mad Australians a lot of pleasure, and that can translate into votes.

But no one can pretend expenditure on elite athletes has broader public health benefits. After the record expenditure on them for the Sydney Olympics, Australians in general got fatter. And if further evidence is needed to debunk the link between Olympics success and mass sport participation, look at the disjunction between the US gold medal tally and the body mass index of its populace. It is possible to be a middling Olympic competitor and a proud, healthy and clever nation. Ask the Canadians. At the time of writing, Canada, with more than 33 million people, was ranked 16th on the medal tally with three golds. Years ago the Canadian Government decided to spend more money on community sport to encourage mass participation, and less on its elite athletes. For the Sydney Olympics, Australia spent more than seven times as much on its team on a per capita basis than did Canada (to win only four times as many medals, which is not really efficient of us).

The pay-off for the Canadians is better health. Despite the pressures of sharing a border with bulging Americans, they have not gone to fat as fast as we have, Professor Norton says. Canadians have a higher life expectancy than Australians and have made huge strides in closing the gap between the health of indigenous and non-indigenous people. And for the record, the biggest source of pride to Canadians in 2004 was not sport but "the fair and equal treatment of all groups" in society. Before Australian politicians get carried away with the claims of a "crisis in Australian sport" funding, there is another crisis that deserves immediate attention. If we want to be clever and not just sporty, the crisis in university funding needs to be fixed. Australia has a respectable three universities in the world's top 100, with the University of Sydney (placed at 97) joining ANU (59) and Melbourne (73) this year. But they are well behind institutions from countries with much smaller populations - Switzerland (24) Denmark (45) and the Netherlands (47). And our old friend Canada is doing significantly better, with the University of Toronto ranked equal 24th and the University of British Columbia at 35th.

Australia can excel in more areas than sport if we spread the wealth and the kudos. Our little patriotic hearts might find more reasons to swell with pride.