Viktor Kovalenko's colleagues call him "the medal maker", with the Sydney-based sailing coach guiding the Australian team to seven Olympic gold medals over the past two decades.
Since the Barcelona Games in 1992, Australia has consistently ranked among the top 10 countries in the Olympic medal tally, something Kovalenko attributes to the "spirit, health and power of Australia".
But he believes Australia's support system for its athletes is inadequate.
"To succeed in sport, to be number one, you have to dedicate all of your life. In sport, this is the same as producing secret weapons," he said.
"You have to collect the best people who can do the job, create the best conditions for them ... and make their life easy.
"But if they have to think about how to feed their family and how to support their future, it would be difficult to do this."
Athletes in Australia are supported through various channels — targeted government grants and corporate and philanthropic platforms to name a couple.
Government support ranges from $4,000 to $37,500 a year. Some may also receive money from sporting bodies and sponsors, although Ryan Holloway, chief partnerships officer at the Australian Sports Foundation (ASF), said many Olympians at the Paris Games wouldn't have.
"A lot of them are self-funded,” he told SBS News.
“Athletes have to find alternate means of revenue and funding to assist with their dreams.
“Many of them would be spending more a year on travel and accommodation costs to attend competitions than they would on some of their basic living needs, like rent or groceries.”
Sailing coach Victor Kovalenko, nicknamed the "medal maker". Source: AFP / William West/via Getty Images
There are more than 1,200 individual athletes on the platform including some who are competing at the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, Holloway said.
He said their pledges range from a couple of thousand to tens of thousands of dollars to cover, among other things, travel costs, training, equipment, and physiotherapy.
Holloway said that although the foundation has been around since 1986, it started running individual peer-to-peer fundraising for athletes in 2016 — the year of the Rio Games.
"We've got some great examples at the moment," Holloway said.
"There's one in particular, Campbell Harrison, who is a sports climber in the Olympics. He's done a phenomenal job.
"He's raised a significant amount of money to help him. He used it not only for his training but travel to competitions to help him qualify for the Olympics and also to help bolster the funding required for him to be in Paris right now."
Australian sport climber Campbell Harrison competing at an event in Innsbruck, Austria, in June. Source: Getty / Marco Kost
"Elite athletes dedicate over six hours a day, six days a week to their sport; that makes is very difficult to hold down a full-time job," Holloway said.
"They are in desperate need of additional funding sources."
The Department of Health and Aged Care is responsible for sports funding.
A department spokesperson said in a statement that the federal government supports athletes training to represent Australia through direct athlete support grants.
The spokesperson also pointed to a $489 million support package for high-performance sport, which the federal government announced in July.
"This will include an uplift in direct grant investment, which will see more athletes supported to perform at their best," the spokesperson said. "It also includes funding for national sporting organisations to support athletes through coaching and high-performance programs."
