According to a series of reports in The Australian newspaper, Australia's prospects at the Tokyo Olympics seem about as promising as Bernard Tomic's lead-up to Wimbledon.

Athletes have allegedly been deprived of funding or are under threat of losing a large percentage of their grants before 2024, while bureaucrats administering taxpayer funds earmarked for sport enjoy substantial salaries and benefits.

The squabbling between the heads of the Australian Sports Commission and the Australian Olympic Committee leaves the impression those charged with orchestrating a nation's success have the leadership capacity of a particularly frisky cocker spaniel.

Meanwhile, there are now more tumbleweeds than tumble turns at the virtually abandoned Australian Institute of Sport, once a conveyor belt for Olympic medal winners.

Given the pro-Olympic movement prism through which these facts and assumptions have largely been presented you might expect Australians to be up in arms.

The nation of Betty Cuthbert and Murray Rose and Cathy Freeman and "punching above its weight" at Baron de Coubertin's five-ringed circus will surely be outraged that its grand Olympic legacy is under threat.

But are we really?

Outside that fortnight in Tokyo when trampolining and ping-pong will be transformed from leisure activities to the source of butt-clenchingly earnest punditry, do we care as much about the Olympics — and Australia's success in it — as we once did?

Cathy Freeman's win in Sydney was cause for national celebration — but do we still love the Olympics that much? ( AAP: Dean Lewis )

The very question will outrage those who continue to insist Australia's Olympic performance contributes mightily to "national pride" and "international prestige" and the other vague feel-good factors used to extract government funding.

2000 Sydney Olympics medal tally Nation G S B T 1 United States 37 24 32 93 2 Russia 32 28 29 89 3 China 28 16 14 58 4 Australia 16 25 17 58 5 Germany 13 17 26 56 10 Great Britain 11 10 7 28 G = Gold S = Silver B = Bronze T = Total

It is 20 years since the Sydney Olympics but, quite justifiably, the sense of civic pride that stupendously successful event created remains strong and now fuels the ambitions of those pushing Brisbane's 2032 bid.

Yet since then Australia has tumbled down the medals chart like a rock climber with a blunt pickaxe from the 58 medals won in Sydney to the 29 collected in Rio.

Olympic officials will tell you this decline is the result of scandalous government neglect and, now, the alleged incompetence and supposedly warped priorities of the Australian Sports Commission.

But Australia's declining fortunes are also partly the consequence of a reality that in some cases defies the long held notion that Olympic victory is all about self-sacrifice and even that "unique Aussie spirit" — the nations that spend the most money win the most medals.

If the Sydney Olympics fostered the idea of Australian athletic exceptionalism, the London Olympics — a virtual replica of Sydney in both its excellent execution and the stupendous home team success — exploded some myths.

The London Olympics provided a string of golden moments for Britain — and funding played a huge part. ( Reuters: Luke Macgregor )

2012 London Olympics medal tally Nation G S B T 1 United States 46 28 30 104 2 China 38 31 22 91 3 Great Britain 29 17 19 65 4 Russia 19 21 28 68 5 Sth Korea 13 9 8 30 8 Australia 8 15 12 35 G = Gold S = Silver B = Bronze T = Total

Most obviously, England's lottery-funded medals bonanza merely underlined how the modern Olympics had become a sporting arms race with places on the medal table determined largely by expenditure (including, in some cases, the cost of state-sponsored doping).

So, if Australia was to continue to spend the kind of taxpayer money required to keep up with the English or, even less likely, behemoths the US, Russia and China, the outcomes would have to be fully justified.

However, the failure to outline the benefits of Australia's medal tallies could itself be an Olympic sport so adept has the Australian Olympic Committee been at avoiding the irritating chore of cost-benefit analysis.

AOC boss John Coates this week played the national health card, declaring: "I think there is still justification for increasing [Olympic] funding based on the health and well-being of an active nation and all those things."

This assertion will have caused raucous laughter from those who recall the AOC's point-blank refusal to provide any justification for further expenditure during the Crawford Report into government sports funding, with Coates instead claiming his loyalty was to the IOC poohbahs in Lausanne.

The jolting truth for proponents of increased Olympic funding is that what little research there has been into the benefits of Olympics on health and participation shows, at best, a brief spike in the number of people running or swimming after the Games followed by a quick return to the couch.

Meanwhile, Australia's major domestic sports are driving significant and sustainable increases in participation through well organised entry-level and early-age junior programs and in turn justifying government investment in stadiums and local facilities — albeit now compromised by the recent sports rorts scandal.

The Olympics has also long lost the exotic aura it once enjoyed as that rare televised international sporting carnival, now Australians have daily access to high-calibre international sport, often featuring local stars.

Aussie basketball fans are itching to see Ben Simmons (L) in a Boomers shirt in Tokyo. ( AAP: James Ross )

This is not to say Australians won't feel greater pride should Ben Simmons help the Boomers win that elusive major championship medal in Tokyo than they might watching him record yet another triple-double with the Philadelphia 76ers.

Nor does it mean we should be discouraging the dreams of those virtually amateur athletes who have the chance to excel at the Olympics where the competition and the spotlight is far greater than a round-robin AFL or NRL game.

However, the sepia-toned nostalgia surrounding Olympic competition has been diluted by the harsher realities of some of those professional sports the IOC has included in its now bloated program.

So when Coates continued his bitter feud with ASC boss John Wylie this week by accusing him of "relevance deprivation", the irony was unmistakable.

To those not sitting in seat 1A of the Lausanne gravy train, it is the relevance of the Olympics that is in question.