It’s a hot, cloudless day in north-west Victoria, and Royal Australian Air Force pilot Nicole Forrester is preparing for take-off.
Her runway is unconventional – straight through a dusty paddock bordered by a simple Ringlock fence.
It would make for a dangerous and unconventional take-off in any jet or cargo plane, but she’s not on the job today.
“I only started flying hang gliders about two years ago,” she says.
At 35, Nicole is among the youngest of 43 hang glider pilots competing at the annual Flatter Than Flat Land event in Birchip.
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As fellow pilot Peter Lissenburg explains, the sport is struggling to attract young members.
“Back in the ’70s we had 500 pilots in Victoria,” he says.
The 68-year-old began hang gliding at 18, at a time when his peers “had already done their apprenticeship and picked up a car”.
“They got a full wage by the time they were 19 or 20, and they hadn’t got mixed up with the girls yet,” he tells triple j Hack.
But the biggest factor reducing participation, he says, is that “there’s a lot of things for young people to do these days”.
From thousands of metres in the air, pilots like Peter have a clear view of the generational shifts that are eroding participation in their sport.
But even at ground level, the winners and losers of Australia’s evolving sport culture are becoming clear to see.
Shifting goalposts
Every year, the national AusPlay survey aims to assess which sports are being played around Australia, and by how many people.
For the most popular activities – walking, gym fitness, athletics – it’s a reliable tracker of what’s keeping the country moving.
But for more niche pursuits – like rodeo, polo, and synchronised swimming – even the 20,000-person annual sample isn’t enough to accurately count.
The rarest sports may not even merit their own category: hang gliding is amalgamated into a broader ‘air sports’ category.
Until 2019, sport climbing fell into that camp as well.
But the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary Free Solo and a debut Olympic event at Tokyo in 2021 helped change that.
Now, AusPlay estimates over 100,000 Australians participate in sport climbing, with a further 350,000 involved in outdoor rock-climbing, abseiling or caving.
Taken together, that figure exceeds rugby league and union combined.
Social climbers
Sarah Dalgleish is part of the wave of recently minted Australian climbers.
She says the cooperative, social atmosphere of bouldering – a type of climbing which relies on crash mats instead of ropes to protect against falls – attracted her to the sport.
“[Regular] gyms do feel a bit judgey,” she says.
“I feel like there’s a bit of a pecking order, like there’s always sort of someone who’s been there a bit longer, more experienced, lifts heavier.”
“[But climbing] becomes a team sport in a way. You work together to get to the top or just to get a bit further than you did last time.”
Jason Elshaug is the owner of the Ballarat bouldering gym where Sarah trains. He’s been climbing for 20 years.
Opened soon after climbing debuted at the Tokyo Olympics, his was the first indoor climbing gym in the city of over 100,000 people.
“There was definitely a noticeable uptick in interest and participation once the Olympics came through,” he says.
This year, climbers Oceana Mackenzie and Campbell Harrison will compete for Australia at the Paris Olympics in two events, after the sport was expanded to receive a second medal category for 2024.
“It’s gonna be really, really cool to cheer them on,” Jason says.
Kids missing out
Of course, many Aussies will entirely miss the rise of climbing, or hang gliders’ slow descent.
After all, competitive team sports like soccer, basketball, and netball remain among the most popular physical activities, particularly for regional Australians and children.
But at junior levels, there’s another change underway.
Sport science professor Rochelle Eime at Federation University says the COVID-19 pandemic marked a major drop in kids’ sport.
“The overall number of Victorians playing sport is actually higher now than what it was pre-COVID,” she says.
“But what we’re seeing is, for the first time, a real decline in primary school-aged children.”
“Those six-to-nine year-olds that would normally enter Auskick or FunNet – they didn’t have school where they could pick up foundation skills through PE [during the lockdowns].”
“If they can’t catch and throw and have confidence, now as a 10 or 11-year-old, we’re really concerned about how they do sport now because they can’t just walk up to a club and play.”
The inequity is felt most strongly in newly developed suburbs, where clubs haven’t had time to take root.
“For five to nine-year-olds in metropolitan growth areas, only 33 per cent are playing sport compared to 71 per cent in regional areas, and for 10 to 14-year-olds, only 36 per cent in metropolitan growth areas compared to 70 per cent in regional areas,” Professor Eime explains.
Accessible, available, alone?
Regardless of a sport’s popularity in the community, clubs take time to mature.
Equipment and infrastructure, a regular player base, and reliable staff – often volunteers – are all needed to keep the game going.
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So, perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the country’s fastest-growing activities don’t require that kind of mass effort and resourcing.
AusPlay points to gym fitness, walking, and running as examples of three fast-growing sports, while resource-intensive club-driven sports like golf, tennis, and squash have each declined since 2001.
The data seems to suggest accessible, non-competitive activities are thriving in Australia.
But that needn’t exclude team sports.
No referee, no worries
To see how a large group can play together without referees, expensive equipment, or school-taught ball skills, look no further than ultimate – sometimes called ultimate frisbee.
“I find it a really fun and fast paced sport that’s highly inclusive and very spirited,” Ballarat Disc Sports’ Leah Cushion says.
She and a few dozen others have gathered at a Ballarat park with only a few discs and some cones to mark the boundaries of their game.
As she explains, ultimate is entirely self-refereed by players, even at the highest level.
“It means you’re accountable for your own actions,” she says.
“So if I had the disc and somebody came in and knocked it out of my hands, I’d be able to say ‘foul’, and then they’d have the opportunity to agree or disagree, and we have a discussion about it.”
“The outcome decides where the disc comes back in – and then we play on.”
AusPlay estimates the number of Australians playing ‘flying disc’ – a catch-all term for ultimate and other disc activities – has more than doubled in the last five years to around 58,000.
It’s closing in on hockey, a sport with a long Australian history that has nonetheless failed to grow its numbers from around 90,000 over the same period.
For Leah, inclusivity is key to ultimate’s success.
“Everybody that rocks up to the sport is not expected to know how to play like [if they were] walking up to a netball or football club – it’s really welcoming,” she says before being subbed into the game.
Gliding into the sunset?
Just seven weeks before attending the hang gliding event in Birchip, Nicole gave birth to a baby boy.
“My son’s in the car just behind us,” she says.
“I’m still pretty fresh but I’ve got a really supportive partner over there, so he’ll look after the baby while I go flying.”
Together, the young family drove over 500 kilometres to attend the Birchip event from their home in Sale, improvising a hang glider rack for their Mazda 3.
The mammoth effort speaks to Nicole’s boundless love of flying, but perhaps also reveals why so few other young people have chosen to take up hang gliding over other, more accessible sports.
“You need to be a fairly adventurous type of person to get into it and you need to have the opportunity as well,” she says.
Altogether, she estimates having spent over $10,000 on a second-hand glider and training, but doesn’t regret the effort or the price.
“Up there lying prone, to me it’s the closest thing to being a bird,” she smiles.
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