Sport In South Australia
Sports play an important role in the business, community and social life and culture throughout Australia. Participation and success in high performance sport and regular health and fitness opportunities in community and grassroots sports are an important part of an active, healthy life for men, women and children across South Australia (SA).
South Australia has produced successful Olympians, Paralympians, Commonwealth Games representatives, World Champions and National Champions across a wide range of individual and team sports. Regional and rural opportunities to participate in sport plays an important role in community life throughout SA. SA has developed a range of programs in supporting inclusive sports pathways focusing on specific populations groups such as indigenous, mature-aged, early childhood, people with disabilities and women.
Sport as entertainment plays an important role with South Australia having the second highest rate of event attendance of all states and territories with 49% of South Australians aged 15 years and over attending a sporting event each year.
Significant sporting events in South Australia include the Tour Down Under', Clipsal 500, Adelaide Cup, International Cricket series and hosting various Australian Swimming Championships. Major events have been shown to bring significant economic benefit to the state.
South Australian-based teams are represented in all major professional sporting codes including Adelaide Football Club and Port Adelaide Football Club in the Australian Football League, the Redbacks and Scorpions in Cricket, Adelaide United in the A-League and W-League, Adelaide 36ers in the National Basketball League and Adelaide Lightning in the Women's National Basketball League, and the Adelaide Thunderbirds in the ANZ Championship for Netball.
The most popular spectator sports in South Australia by attendance are Australian Rules football (31%), motor sports (14%), horse racing (8%), cricket (5%) and soccer (4%).
South Australia boasts world class venues for high performance sport including the Adelaide Super-Drome, Netball SA Stadium, Hindmarsh Stadium and the South Australian Government has recently undertaken a major project redeveloping the iconic Adelaide Oval.
All major sporting codes within South Australia field representative teams on the National stage. South Australia's official sporting colours are red, blue and gold.
Read more about Sport In South Australia: Participation, High Performance Sport, Individual Sports
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“Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Rabelais, for instance, is intolerable; one chapter is better than a volume,—it may be sport to him, but it is death to us. A mere humorist, indeed, is a most unhappy man; and his readers are most unhappy also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.”
—Philip Guedalla (1889–1944)
“It is very considerably smaller than Australia and British Somaliland put together. As things stand at present there is nothing much the Texans can do about this, and ... they are inclined to shy away from the subject in ordinary conversation, muttering defensively about the size of oranges.”
—Alex Atkinson, British humor writer. repr. In Present Laughter, ed. Alan Coren (1982)