The AIS business card that changed Olympian Petria Thomas' life

Jones, then a strength and conditioning coach, knew the swimmer had been sneaking out of campus on Wednesday nights to play basketball and she often told him "I don't eat properly" because of it.

So the note was his way of asking Thomas over for dinner with friends, starting a romance that eventuated with a wedding at the Parliament House rose garden five years later.

"I went very nervously," Thomas recalled.

"I was quite shy back in the day. He told me after we met that he used to say hello and I would barely say hello back, because I was so shy.

"We continued from there, got to know each other better and ended up married.

"I know Julian at the time was really, not concerned, but very aware of the fact that he was a coach and I was an athlete. He wasn't my coach but I believe he went to speak to the director to make sure everything was above board. Everything was okay and we went from there."

Two decades later, the couple still work at the AIS and will be celebrating its 40^th anniversary on Australia Day.

Their story is just one of many in its decorated history although Jones, who is now the institute's performance services manager, has been there since the beginning to help tell it all.

His father was the first appointed coach at the AIS and Jones, then 15, was a weightlifter in its inaugural year.

He fondly remembers the opening ceremony on January 26, 1981, when Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser unveiled the iconic Acrobats statue and declared the AIS "a clear sign that we are no longer going to allow the world to pass us by."

Forty years later the campus has expanded beyond the indoor arena and into the surrounding paddocks, with Jones saying he's walked through each building through various stages of completion.

There have been 8,858 AIS scholarship holders and the National Institution Network now assists 2200 at any one time, investing $145 million per annum in 38 sports across the country.

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"As an elite high-performance environment, you can't beat the AIS for what it's been able to do and the impact it's had on the system as a leader in that area," Jones said.

"It's not your traditional leader in informing and directing, but a catalyst situation to be as good as what's going on. It's played different roles over the years but has been a leader because it was there first."

Sixty per cent of Olympic gold medals won by Australia have come since the AIS was opened, three of those claimed by Thomas at the Athens Games.

She first came to the institute for a training camp in 1992 and recalls standing on the mezzanine level of the pool, watching the AIS squad and thinking "wow, I'll never be as good as these guys."

In 1993, Thomas moved on campus from Mullumbimby and spent the next 12 years on scholarship with the AIS's swimming programme. The rest, as they say, is history.

She went on to win three Olympic and nine Commonwealth Games gold medals, as well as three world championship titles.

"For me, I came from a small country town so I would never have been able to reach the heights that I did without making the move to Canberra," Thomas said.

"My family didn't have a lot of money either, so they couldn't send me to board in Queensland or Sydney to train. The AIS was really the only option for me. It was probably the best decision I ever made to come here, to see if I could reach my potential.

"There's no way I would have done the things that I did without the AIS and the support of the programme, staff, training partners and everything that goes into building success. There's no way I would have achieved those heights had I not been here."

Thomas, who is now Gymnastic Australia's high-performance manager, overcame three shoulder surgeries with help from the AIS across her decorated career - the last of which occurred in the year before her Athens triumph.

Like Thomas, many athletes have come through the rehabilitation centre at crucial times of their careers. Think Sam Kerr before the 2015 World Cup, Lauren Jackson, or Caroline Buchanan following her horrific crash near Cooma.

It was in that gym where Thomas met Jones, with the AIS changing her life in more ways than one.