What these trolls fail to understand is the high achievements made by a small team of athletes chosen from a very narrow base group.

Australia is blessed with good weather most of the time, so the active ones amongst us have a huge variety of sports from which to choose.

Many choose team sports because of the added benefit of the social interaction.

Athletics is quite a hardcore, competitive sport.

You sink or swim by your own efforts. You don’t have a team to hide behind if you have a bad day.

Every spectator will see you fail or succeed.

So many athletes are hardened to possible failure.

This makes them quite resolute, determined and motivated to achieve.

Our population is less than the two US states of Texas and Florida.

Most of our schools don’t have athletic tracks like nearly all US high schools.

Funding is quite difficult to come by and most athletes need a vocation just to be able to get by.

So in this light, our two medallists, Jared Tallent (silver) in the 50km walk and Dane Bird-Smith (bronze) in the 20km walk headed a list of high achievements.

Twenty-eight of our 60 athletes made the top 16 in competition with nine of those making the top eight which included Alana Boyd 4th in pole vault, Dani Samuels 4th in discus, Kathryn Mitchell 6th in javelin, Henry Frayne 7th in long jump, Brooke Stratton 7th long jump, Madeline Hills 7th 3000m steeplechase and who could forget the valiant effort of the young ladies in the 4x400m relay team achieving 8th in their final.

A lot of these talented younger kids started their athletic life in Little Athletics. Little Athletics starts competition next month. If your child loves to run, jump or throw, Little Athletics is the medium by which they can improve.

The Paralympics will be commencing shortly. Athletics Wollongong will be watching anxiously to see how one of our members, James Turner, will perform in his specialty event - the 800m. James is scheduled to run at 6.30am (AEST) on September 18.