Which is Australia’s most successful Olympic town?

Perth, Western Australia, has come out on top in a study into Australia's most successful towns for producing Olympic athletes, according to new University of Sydney research. Kristy O'Neill , a PhD student from the Faculty of Education and Social Work , arrived at the result after examining the profiles of 2160 Australian athletes who had competed in the summer Olympic Games between 1984 and 2012. Using biographical and archival data from the Australian Olympic Committee, official team handbooks, the National Sport Information Centre in Canberra and published newspaper articles, O'Neill then traced each athlete to a corresponding local government area to determine where the athletes were born or raised. Olympic success was determined by those local government areas which had the highest number of representations proportionate to their population size, with the three bordering local government areas of Cambridge, Claremont and Nedlands in Perth emerging as a clear hotspot for nurturing sporting talent. "The 'birthplace effect phenomena' - where elite or professional athletes are more likely to come from small-to-medium-sized communities - has been identified in Canada and the United States, but I wanted to see if this effect also existed in Australia," said O'Neill. As part of her doctoral thesis, O'Neill interviewed 42 people from the local community, including 11 Olympians, to determine which features made Perth such a strong sporting community, and whether this success could be replicated in other areas across Australia.