Australian athletics has had a Cathy and a Sally; what they haven’t had, and really needed, is a Gina.

Swimming has Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, underwriting and underpinning it. Swimming has been able to mine Olympic gold by relying on, in part, on the miner’s largesse.

Athletics has no equivalent, just the niggardly Commonwealth government and ever-changing, ever more convoluted and complex funding formulas to rely upon.

At length athletics has enviously eyed the philanthropy that has washed money into swimming pools and wondered why there has not been a similar, uber-wealthy Australian – a “Twiggy” Forrest or a new young techy such as Mike Cannon-Brookes, for instance – who has said “I want to do that for athletics”.

Instead, athletics has formed the Athletics Foundation to try to start dragging in money for the perennially cash-strapped sport. The foundation wants to reach out to the wealthiest Australians, but also corporations and the slightly less well-heeled (which is pretty much everyone else) who want to financially back the sport (now tax-deductible) in the way philanthropists have long underpinned opera and the arts.

The timing of the announcement on Thursday seeks in part to leverage off the success and goodwill of the Australian efforts in Tokyo, but in part coincidentally arrives just as connections between the senior and junior levels of the sport are closer than they have ever been.

Of course, it should never come to this. Something as culturally significant as national-level sport – that provides not only a sense of identity but a message of health and community connection – should never be begging for money the way athletics, and for that matter, all other sports not funded by TV broadcast deals or the goodwill of a billionaire, have to.

Rohan Browning, Australia’s fastest person, who said he had personally benefitted from direct financial help from benefactors, framed the issue most persuasively.