It seems like being an Australian and doing swimming is like being a Canadian and doing ice skating. Every kid pretty well does it, so when it comes to sports that include swimming Australia gets to pick from an entire national pool and when it comes to sports involving skating, Canadians get that deep pool (thus you see the success of our speed skating teams most of whom don't neccessarily grown up speed skating, but take it up when they lose interest in hockey or figure skating).

Interesting logic!

Aussie did get 10 swimming medals, but the closest to a running medal was the 2 medals for walking ....how do you extrapolate that data to triathlon?

Canada had to be wrapped with 29 medals this year... Do they have an equivalent of the Australian institute of sport youth development program? That was quite old but it worked and UK started one years before the London games which was also effective in getting the Queen medals since she would be kind enough to host. They analysed which sports records hadn't moved in years and which sports were potentially softest then found people that met the physical qualifications.... That's how track cycling amongst others became a success there

You have to remember Australia’s number one sport is Afl and league and cricket.

Swimming and running doesn’t rate at all here.

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Unfortunately true...
Olympic sports get coverage once every four years (some exaggeration, but not that much).

From a rowing perspective, there are so many athletes floating around in football / rugby who could be very good indeed but aren't exposed to it, or are and have decided that it's a better use of their time to train twice a week and play once a week in grade or 'amateur' and get paid a few hundred bucks a game.

Every country has their equivalent of AFL and cricket....soccer, basketball, American Football, Hockey, Tennis....whatever sport. There are the big team sports or the big money sport that the good athletes go into and then all these mechanical individual sports that uncoordinated people go into. Australia does not have a monopoly on the talent pool getting sucked up by big money team sports. Every country has that going on. My point was at least all of Australia learns how to swim (like pretty well all of Canada ends up on skates at some point).

You phrased that excellently.