With the Games taking place in Beijing this month, we talk with two Chartered Accountants who are proud Olympians. 
 
Story Tony Malkovic Portrait Photography Raw Image  
 
It’s the biggest show on the planet. The Beijing Olympics will feature 10,708 athletes competing in 302 events in 28 sports, with 70,000 volunteers helping out. And all the drama, emotions and anguish will be unfolding before an estimated television audience of some four billion people worldwide. 
 
Grant Boyce CA won’t be in Beijing, but he’ll be watching with great interest the 50 or so competitors whom he and his colleagues helped get to China. 
 
Boyce is a former national Australian hockey player, whose own remarkable Olympic story reads like something from a Rocky film. 
 
He’s probably one of the very few people in the world who ended up competing at the Olympics having virtually retired from his chosen sport. 
 
More remarkably, that comeback wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t have been for a chance conversation on the other side of the world. 
 
Boyce is a Chartered Accountant based in Perth, who played with the Australian men’s hockey team as a mid-fielder and defender in the late 1970s. He was picked in the team to compete at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. But because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, many western countries – including Australia – boycotted the event. Politics, not sport, won out. 
 
“It was very disappointing, we were devastated,” recalls Boyce. “We were very unhappy about it. We tried to lobby, as much as we could in those days, but we were unsuccessful.” 
 
He says with the convoluted politics being played out, some Australians competed in Moscow – but not the men’s and women’s hockey sides. And for some players, they’d cost their only chance. 
 
“Some of the guys who got picked for the first time in 1980, didn’t get picked or were too old or weren’t playing well enough in 1984, so they never got to an Olympics. I was fortunate enough to stick around, I suppose, and got picked again,” he says. Well, not quite. It didn’t happen that easily. 
 
In 1982, two years after the Moscow imbroglio, Boyce got the equivalent of an offer he couldn’t refuse, one that took him halfway around the world and sidelined his hockey career. 
 
Having started working with Ernst & Young after he graduated, he was asked if he wanted to move to New York to work. 
 
Hard Choice 
“So the choice I had was ‘Do I go to New York?’ which obviously had some attractions or ‘Do I stay in Perth because of my hockey?’,” he recalls. 
 
“I felt it was too good a chance to miss. I was married at the time. We thought we might not have had a chance to live in another country like that and we didn’t have children so it was an easy move in that respect.” 
 
But a hard choice nevertheless. “Yes and no, but I’d been in the national team for five or six years, from 1977-82,” muses Boyce. 
 
“You’ve got to take your chances in life, I suppose.” 
 
Hockey doesn’t enjoy a huge profile in the US and, in effect, Boyce hung up his hockey stick and shin guards. 
 
“I played a very short time over there socially, but at a very low level, just to keep my hand in,” he says. 
 
“But effectively I had retired, in my mind I had retired.” 
 
Working in New York was full on, with Boyce based at the global hub of the company. 
 
“It was an international office set up to coordinate practices for the firm around the world,” he says. 
 
“So if the Australian office was doing something really well, the plan was to take that idea to New York and export it to other parts of the organisation. 
 
“So it was really a coordination role, it wasn’t pure accounting or tax or anything like that. 
 
“All of the managing partners from each of the regions would meet on a regular basis and we’d prepare papers for them and all sorts of stuff.” 
 
With his hockey career all but over, a trip out of New York and a chance conversation saw Boyce take to the pitch again. 
 
“I went and watched an Australian women’s national team play at Boston, because my wife Adele had also played for Australia,” Boyce says. 
 
“And the coach of the Australian women’s team was actually a national men’s selector. 
 
“And he was the one who said to me: ‘Have you thought about trying out for Los Angeles?’ – and that was how it all started.” 
 
Apprehensive 
So Boyce returned to Australia to take part in a national competition, hardly having played at all in the previous 12 months. 
 
“I was apprehensive, I hadn’t played for a long time and had to get fit over there by having to train through their winter which was very difficult,” he says. Training in a northern winter would have been difficult, but playing well enough to get back into a national side was probably harder. 
 
“You couldn’t do it these days, because the level of commitment required is a lot higher. There’s no question that the guys today train every day of the week,” he says. “But I was fortunate, WA had a very strong hockey team and a coach (Frank Murray, currently coach of the Australian Olympic women’s side) who was prepared to give me a chance, I suppose.” 
 
Boyce reignited his passion for the game and put in the practice and commitment. It paid off. He was selected for the team to compete at the Los Angeles Olympics. 
 
As a result, he was among the huge crowd of athletes and spectators at the opening ceremony at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum – an extravaganza complete with a rocket man and jet-propelled backpack hovering over the crowd and 84 pianists on 84 grand pianos playing Rhapsody in Blue to a worldwide audience. Just being there, he says, was unforgettable. 
 
“The opening ceremony was probably one of the highlights of the games, that and living in the village surrounded by lots of athletes from other sports and other countries – that was a pretty exciting place to be as well,” he says.They were the good memories, that and winning five straight matches. But there was one other, overwhelming memory.  
 
“The one that remains with you unfortunately is the one where we lost. We finished on top of our pool and played Pakistan in the semi – and you remember it because it’s devastating,” recalls Boyce. “We lost 1-0, it was a very controversial goal – probably hit outside the circle as it turns out, but there you go.” 
 
Cruel 
The anguish was compounded when the Australian team was defeated by Great Britain in the playoff for the bronze medal, losing 3-2. 
 
“We came fourth overall. We thought we would finish better than that, we thought we were a gold medal prospect, but we got knocked out,” he says. 
 
“Sport is a cruel thing, really, with the highs and lows. When you win, there’s an incredible euphoria. But when you lose you’re at the complete other end of the spectrum at the elite level, because you play for keeps.” Back home, Boyce was a partner with Ernst & Young for six years, then set up his own firm in Perth – Montrose Partners – specialising in privately owned businesses. He’s also on the board of a small public company, Sirtex Medical Limited, which is developing a treatment for liver cancer. But he retains a strong link to sport, helping the next generation of Olympians achieve their goals. 
 
He’s the chairman of the Western Australian Institute of Sport, a State-based body that provides programs for elite sportspeople to compete at the highest levels. 
 
The voluntary role combines his first-hand understanding of what elite sportspeople need, with his professional skills in financial reporting, accountability, governance and 
strategic goal setting. 
 
“Our role at WAIS is very simply to provide the opportunity for West Australians to achieve at the highest level in sport, that is to represent their country. In a nutshell, that’s what we’re trying to do,” he explains. “Our whole aim is to partner with sports to develop the upper echelons of the athletes to get themselves onto the national teams – that’s our sole measure really. 
 
“So for Beijing, for example, our benchmark is to get 10 per cent of the Australian team to come from Western Australia, because the population of WA is 10 per cent of Australia’s. And we hope to get a bit more than that … we’re hoping for 45 to 50.” 
 
Medal Prospects 
That goal got off to a good start when it was announced in mid-June that four WAIS hockey players made the Olympic squad, in effect making up a quarter of the squad. Boyce reckons both the women’s and men’s hockey sides are medal prospects at Beijing and he’ll be following their progress closely in front of his lounge room TV. 
 
“I’ll be watching a lot of it – not just the hockey,” he predicts. “It’ll be a bit of a distraction for a couple of weeks, I must say.” Boyce says although sportspeople spend a huge amount of their lives aiming to compete for their country, many people are unaware of the long-term efforts of others to help them get there.  
 
Business, governments, sport institutes, volunteers and families all have their part to 
play. 
 
And while sport might be played on pitches, pools and running tracks, a lot of the impetus comes from corporate boardrooms, sponsorship deals and fundraising. Early estimates indicated it’s going to cost some $14 million to send the Australian team of around 500 athletes and 300 support staff to Beijing. And that’s only part of the total $32.7 million budget set aside to plan, prepare and carry out Australia’s overall 2008 Olympic efforts. 
 
“A lot of it is direct assistance to the team,” explains Boyce. “But a lot of it happens in the four years leading up to the Olympics where the commercial sector is supporting different sporting bodies – such as hockey, athletics, swimming – in the development years. “We very much work on a four-year cycle culminating in 2008, and it’ll start again for 2012. 
 
“There’s an enormous amount that happens in the early years and this is just the end of it. And the corporate sector helps to fund a lot of that all the way through from developing them in the early parts of the cycle and finishing them off in the end.” Having competed at the Olympic level, Boyce is in no doubt about what it means. “The Olympics is the pinnacle. It’s nice if you play for your country (at the international level), but it’s better to play in the Olympics,” he says. 
 
Rewarding 
Nearly a quarter of century after he took part in the opening ceremony in LA, Boyce still gets a buzz out of helping others achieve their Olympic goals. 
 
“It’s very rewarding,” says Boyce. “I can’t compete anymore, I’m well past that but it’s a contribution I can make having been through that system myself and experienced the highs of playing at that level. 
 
“It’s rewarding that you can put a bit back and help because there’s an enormous cost to get an Australian team or athlete to the Olympics, if you take their whole development through the years – in the case of gymnasts, it might be from the age of nine or 10 through to their 20s – in the case of others, it might be from 15 or 16 through to when they’re 30 or so. 
 
“It’s a big cost and there’s an enormous amount of people who spend a lot of time in the background. 
 
“If you take WAIS, for instance, there are some 45 people going to Beijing, but we’ve got a staff of about probably 60 working – including 20 full-time coaches and some 23 part-time coaches. 
 
“And they’re working long hours – starting early in the morning in the case of rowing, and finishing late in the day with other sports. “There’s a massive commitment by a lot of people to get athletes there. And the buzz we get out of it is when the athletes make it on the teams and they’re successful.” 
 
The official motto of the Olympics is “Citius, altius, fortius“ (Latin for swifter, higher, stronger) adopted by Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games. 
 
The lesser-known saying that also summarises the Olympic ideal is De Coubertin’s other catchcry: “The most important thing is not to win but to take part.” It’s a phrase with which Boyce – and all our Olympians headed for Beijing – can well and truly identify. 
 
MAKING A SPLASH 
Sydney Chartered Accountant Mark Bellofiore will be fully immersed in the Olympics this month – as a competitor representing Australia in the doubles slalom canoeing. 
 
Bellofiore and team mate Lachie Milne, a doctor, have been paddling together since 2002 and have competed at four world championships and the Athens Olympics. Now they’re representing Australia at the Beijing Olympics. And like most of their fellow competitors, they’ve had a gruelling lead-up. 
 
“On average, we train 18-22 hours per week,” explains Bellofiore. “This consists of seven or eight sessions in the water, three or four sessions in the gym and a run.” The training might soak up the hours and weeks, but when competing, paddlers typically take only about 100 seconds to finish their runs. Mind you, it’s an intense minute and a half. 
 
“Slalom canoeing is a very fast and exciting sport,” says Bellofiore. “It involves negotiating your way down a 300-metre whitewater channel passing through 18-22 gates. 
 
“Six of these gates must be negotiated in an upstream direction. Each competitor has two runs down the course with the times taken added together.” 
 
Bellofiore, 25, is originally from Victoria but moved to Sydney in 2002 to train with the Australian Institute of Sport, based at the Penrith Whitewater Stadium. 
 
“After beginning my cadetship with PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2002 and finishing my business degree in 2005, I wanted to further my accounting skills by completing the Chartered Accountants Program. I knew that having my CA designation would always be beneficial to my career,” he says. 
 
So how does he juggle such a hectic sport and work load? 
 
“PwC have been very supportive of my canoeing career from early on,” he says. “At times during the year, I’ve been able to work part-time and have always been given time off to travel overseas for competitions and training camps. 
 
“I’m currently on a 5-month leave of absence from work in order to train and compete at the Olympics. In September, I’ll return to our Private Client Services division. My time is divided between middle market assurance engagements and smallscale advisory work such as due diligence and capital raisings.” 
 
Bellofiore says it’s been a hectic few years preparing for Beijing but he enjoys keeping busy and having lots on the go. “Without PwC’s support, it would’ve been impossible. I’ve been very lucky. 
 
“Once I return in September. I’ll sit down and make some clear decisions about my career. I plan to retire from competitive sport after the Beijing Olympics and focus on my professional career. I’m sure that whatever I end up doing, I’ll be drawing on the skills I’ve learnt as a Chartered Accountant.”