Lucky Moments

After my report about the tragic moments in sport history for Australia, I received details about incredible happy moments in this matter.

The first Olympic medal in the winter games in Salt Lake City happened to Steven Bradbury in 2002. He was last in the 1000-meter speed skating tournament. He never had a real chance to get a medal. However, in the last curve something incredible happened. Four skaters who were fighting desperately for the golden medal tried to get into the perfect position. Seems they were a bit too ambitious and thus it happened that all lost ground and were disqualified. The Australian who was last was the only one who crossed the finishing line and won the golden medal. Sensational. Check it out:

And thus Australia is the only nation in the Southern hemisphere that won a golden medal at Olympic winter games.

There is even a better more unknown part of this story. In the quarter final Bradbury did not qualify for the semi final as he was 3rd and only the two best qualified for the semi final. However, one of them was disqualified later on thus Bradbury made it to the semi final. Here again he was last and as in the final skaters before him falling so that he made it to the final.

No wonder that Australians use the word ‘Bradbury” now when someone is lucky. Even in slang dictionaries you can find this nowadays. (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bradbury).

But not enough. In 2007 for Australians national day Steven Bradbury received a special honor and got a stamp with his picture on it (only 100 Australians ever got this honor).

Gambling in Australia

Even gambling is kind of a sport in Australia and millions of Australian love it. Sounds weird to Europeans and therefore here some more details.

First of all Australia is the land of clubs. There are thousands of clubs as for example a fire brigade club, a club for retirees, a bowling club (btw. you play it on artificial turf), a club for fishermen, surfing club etc.

Those clubs have a social function and earn money just offering beverages and gambling facilities. The bigger clubs have gambling halls with hundreds, no even thousands of one-arm bandits. And Australians are particular attracted by them. There are clubs in which 20.000 Australians gamble per night. You can find in those clubs all kind of entertainment: cinemas, restaurants, sport facilities, playgrounds for kids etc. Those clubs are part of huge industry, which make huge profit and guarantee thousands of work places. This is only possible as Australians are the biggest gamblers. The average Australians gambles 2.000 dollars per year. Their favorites are poker machines, which they call ‘Pokies’.

This does not sound too extreme. However, listen to those numbers to understand the passion for gambling in Australia. In Australian is 1% of the world’s population and at the same time there are 20% of all gambling machines in the world.

X-mas in Summer

When there are 30 degrees Celsius while you are in the shades it is hard to get into Christmas feeling. However, it was not only the Australian summer, which made it hard to get into pre-Christmas mood. There are no Christmas markets in Australia. Maybe that makes sense as no one wants to drink hot-spiced wine in that heat. And even the Christmas decoration is a bit different to traditional German one. Santa Clause seems to adapt pretty easy to other circumstances. At the end it only counts that Santa gets the presents to the Australian kids…

And so we had to attend the Regensburg Christkindelmarket on the first night when we were back...

Sport Nation

If you are born in Australia, your chance to get an Olympic medal becomes twice as high compared to a German and five times higher than that of an American. Australian sportsmen won 3.78 medals per million inhabitants in the Olympic games in Atlanta 1996. Even though they have besides the Olympic disciplines Australian Football and Cricket as popular sports. This nation you can truly call sports-minded. Thus you can almost believe the following crazy story: A man goes to the Grand Final in Melbourne and is surprised to find out that the seat next to him is empty.

As the tickets were sold out months before the game this cannot really be the case. Thus the man asks the other guy who is sitting on the other side of the empty seat if he knows more. The old man replies: ‘This is the seat of my wife who passed away.’ The other guy reflects and asks:’ Didn’t you have the chance to give the ticket to a friend or a relative?’ The old guy gives him a puzzled look and replies: ‘They are all busy. They are at the funeral.’