MELBOURNE: Sports-mad Australia has long punched above its weight at the Olympics but experts say it is watching nervously as Asian giants emerge with burgeoning middle-classes and a thirst for sporting success.

At the last Olympics in Athens, Australia was fourth on the medal table with 49 medals, including a record 17 gold — putting the nation of just 21 million people among the world’s sporting superpowers.

Olympic swimming coach Alan Thompson warned earlier this year that Australia could not take its success for granted, saying countries such as China were challenging in traditional areas of strength such as the pool.

“I think there’s going to be a greater spread of medals than we’ve seen before, so it may not be possible to get the numbers of medals we had last time,” he said.

“We need to make some major changes the way we fund our high performance sport if we are to compete with the 300 million people from America or the 1.3 billion people from China.”

An Australian government report released in May made a similar point, saying China had a base of elite athletes some 200 times larger than Australia’s, as well as a much younger population.

“New competitors are emerging and old foes are growing stronger,” the sports department report said. “Australia must adapt to these changing circumstances ... no longer can it simply be business as usual.”

Melbourne Cricket Club librarian and sports historian David Studham said Australia’s strong sporting culture came about partly because it was an area that allowed a relatively small nation to excel on the world stage.

“We celebrate our Olympic medallists more than we do our Nobel laureates, that says something about our society,” Studham told AFP.

He said Australia had also led the way with innovative coaching methods and the establishment of training academies such as the Australian Institute of Sport, which the government describes as the “Harvard of the sports world”.

But Studham said that as Asia became richer, its people also wanted the national prestige that accompanied sporting success and many had set up Australian-style academies or hired Australian coaches to achieve it.

“You have a growing middle class with more leisure time,” he said. “Doing well in sport is a way for some countries to say ‘we’ve arrived’ and it’s a matter immense national pride.”

One country already fulfilling its Olympic potential is China. Ranked 12th on the medal table in Seoul in 1988, it was second in Athens in 2004 and is tipped by many experts to top the standings in Beijing.

India has much further to go to end a long history of Olympic underachievement but Indian Olympic Association president Suresh Kalmadi told the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this year that the ambition was there.

Kalmadi said he expected the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi to be a catalyst that broadens India’s sporting interests beyond an obession with cricket.

He said after Delhi, India would consider bidding for the 2020 Olympics and would need to improve performances on the field.

“This is a great incentive to promote Olympic sports in the country,” he said.

However, Studham warned that investment in sports across Asia had often been sporadic as public interest has waxed and waned, leading to inconsistent results.

“You have peaks and troughs,” he said. “The 1988 Seoul Olympics is a good example where the South Koreans poured a lot of money into sport and had very good success in a number of areas.”

Yet after finishing fourth on the table at Seoul, South Korea had slipped out of the top 10 by Sydney 2000.

Studham said sport naturally went in cycles and Australia, for all its Olympic tradition and sporting prowess, may be vulnerable to new challengers after investing heavily in hosting the 2000 Games.

“I’ll be interested to see how we go in London (in 2012), as we get further away from the Sydney Olympics will we drop off?”