At the start of the year even the most diehard Raiders supporter wouldn't have said the Green Machine would be an NRL premiership contender.

Deep down they were dreaming and now it's becoming a reality.

They are proof that Australian sport is about backing the underdog and watching them rise to the top.

But what happens when favourites fall flat and a nation is left disappointed?

The blame game is about to start from the Olympic Games wash-up and Australia's worst medal tally since 1992.

But who should pay for the Rio disappointment as officials begin a fight in the boardroom to clean up what happened in Rio?

Australian Sports Commission bosses will meet next week to start dissecting the Games and what went wrong as Australia fell well short of its medal predictions.

They didn't want to start the boardroom war until the returning athletes had their time in the sun, but later next week a future path may become clearer.

Australia won eight gold medals and now the athletes have left Rio, the funding debate and blame-game has taken centre stage.

Australia's obsession with sport has been widely acknowledged and over-dramatised, but what we certainly love is talking about sport. For good or for bad.

The first weekend things were going well. Mack Horton was an anti-doping crusader and the Campbell sisters' smiles glistened as they broke the 4x100-metre freestyle relay world record.

We were warming up our dialogues declaring our love for this athlete and that, but then suddenly the medals dried up and the discussions turned sour.

In victory, abstract discussions about nation-building and Aussie toughness reign supreme, but in defeat the discussions become equally creative.

Suddenly the water cooler is surrounded by high-performance sports psychologists and the cost to the taxpayer for each medal won is counted.

But as ridiculous and as far-fetched as some reasons are around the importance of sport to the nation, winning just eight gold medals is not an option.

A popular notion is sport is an unnecessary cost and in terms of public spending it should be relegated behind industries that better service the community such as health and the homeless.

This is absolutely true, but the luxurious expenditure of sport is still necessary.

Casting all the existential values aside, Australia is not capable of being content with the medal tally from Rio or London and the Australian Sports Commission's Winning Edge strategy will need to be dramatically altered.

Single sculls gold medallist Kim Brennan eloquently described the necessity to support Olympic athletes in her article, "If only Australia were proud of us", for Fairfax Media.

"It is a vessel that gives us something to unite in a collective. Something that brings us together over the water cooler, on the train, walking the dog. Something to bring joy and hope," Brennan wrote.

Brennan rightly illustrates the capability of sport to in turn fund charities and provide an avenue for opportunity where there otherwise isn't one.

And even simpler than that, we love sport too much and the industries created within sport can not survive with such poor showings.

One thing for certain is greater funding increases Olympic performances, with Great Britain a prime example of this.

Great Britain has also shown through the national lottery system that funding does not need to come from taxpayers.

The United States' focus on collegiate sports provides another alternative funding structure.

Kate Lundy was the sports minister during the creation of the Winning Edge post-London Games but refused to comment on the strategy's success.

Hopefully the mouth-piece for the next high-performance strategy is more willing to talk post-Tokyo.