Wildly OT:
This article ran in the National Post (Canada) yesterday. I was going to send it via PM, but thought there might be other Aussie lurkers.
Good on ya, Australia
'The best games ever': Good-humoured Sydney shows what Olympics can be
Jack Todd
Southam Olympic Bureau
Steve Holland, The Associated Press
While you were sleeping, the XXVIIth Olympiad ended as it began 16 days ago, with an enormous crowd singing Waltzing Matilda in beautiful Stadium Australia as the definitive Olympics of our time slipped into history with pomp and ceremony and a little boogie-woogie.
Four years after the wretched, redneck Olympics of Atlanta, Australia got it right. Spectacularly, almost flawlessly right. The buses ran on time. The computers worked. The phones were connected. The volunteers -- well-trained, smart and flexible --were the best we have ever seen at an event this size. The venues, especially the Aquatic Centre, the SuperDome and Stadium Australia, were spectacular. The security was so low-key (especially in comparison with the armed-camp atmosphere of Barcelona and Atlanta) that at times you wondered if it was actually there.
Above all, the Australians created an atmosphere in which athletes could perform at their best for spectators who had the best possible view of their performance. At a point when we were all almost ready to despair of the Olympic movement in the wake of Atlanta and the bribery scandals involving top IOC officials, Sydney 2000 showed the world what an Olympics can be.
Juan Antonio Samaranch, whose wife died shortly after the Opening Ceremony, had flown back from Spain after her funeral to preside over the balance of his final Olympiad. His closing praise of the Sydney Games as "the best Olympic Games ever" did not ring hollow, nor was there any need to resort to a cautious choice of words as in Atlanta, when Samaranch referred to the 1996 Games as "exceptional."
Sydney was both exceptional and the best. Perhaps the IOC should quit while it's ahead. Admit there can never be a better Olympic Games, and be done with it. Sydney had so many things going for it that the standard that was set here will be impossible to match -- a beautiful natural setting, a superior infrastructure and public transit system, a location that made it a difficult target for terrorists, a more than adequate budget and what may be the best sporting populace on the planet.
Even here, you could feel the strain at times, especially the night of the Opening Ceremony and again on "Super Friday," the day the track and field competition began. The Summer Olympics have become so huge that even a beautifully organized city such as Sydney is at full stretch to accommodate it all. No city can handle more people, more sports, more venues, more athletes, more media, more fans.
Athens in 2004 will no doubt be bigger and bulkier and even more frenetic, if that is possible. It won't be better, because that is impossible. Every Olympic Games comes down to the people, the volunteers who are asked to stand by a chain-link fence 12 hours a day, take abuse from athletes and coaches, media and fans -- and keep smiling. The Aussies win the Olympic gold medal because they have the best people. A dozen times a day, two dozen times a day, you heard the same phrases here: "Not a problem, mate." "No worries."
Ask a volunteer if you could cut through this particular gate to get from the SuperDome to Stadium Australia: "Not a problem." Thank a bus driver for a lift back to the media village after midnight: "No worries, mate."
The Japanese in Nagano were efficient and polite and astonishingly helpful. The Australians in Sydney were efficient, polite, astonishingly helpful and possessed of such an unforced cheeriness that you felt at times as though you had tumbled into a black hole in Atlanta and emerged in the happiest country on the planet.
The trained volunteers were cheerful, but so were the people you met on trains and in cafes and sitting on park benches. They said "g'day," and "how ya going?" and if you said you were well, they said "good on ya!"
At the venues, they took this nearly unbroken good humour and turned it into good sportsmanship. More than any other single factor, that is what made Sydney 2000 the rousing success it was. They cheered boisterously for Australian athletes everywhere, but they cheered others as well.
They wanted to see athletes do well. It didn't really matter whether you came from Ethiopia or Kazakhstan, Sweden or Chile.
They could be provoked into booing, but it took some doing, as when the men's 4x100-metre relay team from the U.S. flexed and strutted and stuck out their tongues on the podium while Henry Kissinger waited to present their medals.
For the most part they were lively and funny and good-natured, even when their own heroes were losing -- as at the tennis venue, when Canada's Daniel Nestor and Sébastien Lareau dethroned the legendary Woodies to win Olympic gold.
And they finished it with a bang-up party last night, as you knew they would.
By the time they lit that enormous "River of Fire" trail of fireworks from Stadium Australia to Sydney Harbour yesterday, we all knew that these millennium Olympic Games had been something special.
Now and then this aching planet does come together, in ways that can move and surprise you.
No worries, Australia. Not a problem, you did well. Good on ya.
nationalpost.com |
