Host With the Most

In exactly 200 days, this city will be ready to rumble. On Friday night, Sept. 15, it will throw one of those coming-out parties we have come to expect and cherish every four years, celebrating the athletes of the world.

It will be Summer Olympics time, when, traditionally, we:

* Care about sports we don’t care about.

Little girls are given gold medals for dancing with ribbons and we weep. Horses prance, are rewarded for precision hoofing and we applaud. In a panic to buy tickets to an event, any event, we gobble up those to team handball and are stunned that we don’t get to see athletes banging a small, hard rubber ball against the back wall.

* Rush home from work for the NBC telecast, forgetting about things such as time zones and 27-year-old network producers who think they are Bud Greenspan.

We want results. We get “Up Close and Personal.” We want to know how high was the high jump and how long was the long jump. Instead, we get Valerie Bicepsnovich from Bulgaria, who overcame hay fever and measles, all in the same year, and grew to become heavyweight lifter Big Val, whose clean-and-jerk certainly will be an Olympic record once the second urine test comes back and clears him of this foolish steroid talk.

* Get teary when one of ours raises the Stars and Stripes in celebration, no matter how contrived it may be.

Hey, Homer, isn’t it cool how that 15-by-15-foot American flag and 10-foot flagpole screwed perfectly into the end of that javelin? Isn’t it amazing, Ethel, how those TV cameras knew just where to point when our lad beat those foreigners and reached for the Red, White and Blue?

*

It’s OK. Truly. The Olympics is one of those times when unabashed homerism feels right. All we really want is to hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” a lot and have a good show that is run well. And since these Games are not in Atlanta, we should be OK on that last issue.

The United States Olympic Committee is in charge of national anthem frequency, and the likelihood is that it will deliver well. It is hard to screw up the athletic fortunes of the largest, richest country in the world, even if you are trying, and the USOC certainly isn’t doing that.

As for the good show, here’s a prediction: This one will be among the best.

Sydney is a city created for an event such as the Olympics. Not only has it built some of the most impressive competition venues in the history of the Games, but it is a city of atmosphere and flavor, of sophistication and adventure. It is an international city not quite aligned in reputation with Paris, London, Barcelona, Montreal, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Tokyo and Hong Kong, mainly because it is so far off the world’s beaten path.

The television cameras will have a field day. If you have been paying attention, you have already seen numerous pictures of the Sydney Harbor Opera House. As the song says, “[It’s] Only Just Begun.”

There is the Sydney Harbor Bridge across the way from the Opera House. It spans two of the city’s peninsulas, is high enough for huge freighters to slide easily underneath, but not so high that hundreds of adventuresome spirits are kept from parading to the top span every day. They call it “The Climb of Your Life.” Expect some of those 27-year-old producers to take it.

Sydney has as many harbors as Los Angeles has strip malls. There seems no end to oceanside walkways and quaint restaurants with color-coordinated awnings to protect your fillet of baramundi and glass of Australian Gold Coast chardonnay from hovering sea gulls. Olympic visitors will fill the walkways around the Opera House, at the Circular Quay, at the shops and restaurants of the nearby Rocks District, and along both sides of Darling Harbor.

It is a city where you can take a nice 40-minute ferry ride to the famous Pacific Ocean Manly Beach, stop on the way back to cuddle a koala at the Torango Zoo and return in time for a fancy dinner and some gambling at the Star City Casino, which overlooks yet another harbor.

File those names away. Maybe you won’t be going, but you will be getting “Up Close and Personal,” anyway, from a lot from those spots. At Manly, and many other beaches, wearing tops of swim suits seems to be optional. Expect many of those 27-year-old producers to be there, filming. Just don’t expect them to get it on the air.

*

The most celebrated mega international sporting events are those with great areas for congregating. The ’94 World Cup had Old Town in Pasadena and Church Street Station in Orlando; Barcelona had Las Ramblas; Atlanta, though mostly an aesthetic failure, at least had Buckhead.

Sydney has about 20 of each.

The only previous Australian Olympics was in 1956 in Melbourne. The two main cities in this vast but sparsely populated country a 16-hour plane ride from Los Angeles are fairly competitive but there appears to be a united front seeking Sydney’s success.

One official of the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) explained it this way: “You Americans are used to having all these huge events. Like conventions. You run them all the time. I think that’s part of what some of the trouble was in Atlanta. They thought it was just going to be like another big convention, and since they had run so many of those, they just figured everything would eventually work out, like the conventions do. Here, there’s nothing this big, before or again, so everybody in this country is focused on it.”

That doesn’t mean that all is well, or that winning the bid to host the Olympics hasn’t been, as it usually is for the cities that take this on, a huge pain in the neck.

The main problems are recent, attracting big headlines and prompting deep soul searching. The first week of February, only 225 days from the Games, the structure of SOCOG was torn up. New people were given authority. Old hands who had been doing much of the spadework for years were demoted and publicly shamed. Committee members once responsible for one thing were out, or responsible for something else. Suddenly, SOCOG had organizational chart hell.

A $125-million shortfall was identified. SOCOG had overestimated the seats it had to sell to events and wrongly projected how many sponsors would write checks.

Just as the local media did, and should do, with every Olympic issue, whether in Los Angeles, Atlanta or elsewhere, the Sydney media pounced. Righteous indignation oozed. An editorial writer in the Sydney Australian wrote: “Michael Knight [Olympic president], having discerned that the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games has a public profile for competency lower than your average chook raffle, has rearranged the deck chairs.”

Whatever they are, “average chook raffles” apparently aren’t held in high regard here.

The SOCOG upheaval followed on the heels of a quickly dismissed accusation against Kevan Gosper, Australia’s most influential member of the International Olympic Committee, that he had lined his pockets with some of that Salt Lake City freebie gold. As it turned out, the local media were more interested in, and more enraged about, the mess at SOCOG. And so, with little more than a shrug, it accepted a statement from IOC Vice President Dick Pound that Gosper was really a good boy and that those city slickers from Salt Lake had somehow cooked the books on him.

There were also the issues with Ian Thorpe, Aussie teenage swimming phenom, who appears certain to win gold in abundance here. Thorpe’s times have come down dramatically, so dramatically that the German swimming coach, Manfred Theismann, said during a European meet that “some of the coaches were sitting around, wondering if he might not be helping himself a bit with something.”

The fair-haired local hero had been maligned, and an entire country--a country that, coincidentally, has been quick to point fingers at other countries’ drug suspects--was furious.

In the middle of all this, the aborigine-boycott question cropped up again, and took an unexpected turn. Some aborigine leaders, while having nothing against the Olympics, have said that they will use the Games as a forum for public demonstration, calling attention to abuses of their rights.

But Cathy Freeman, an aborigine who won the silver medal in the 400-meter run at Atlanta and is among the country’s most famous and revered athletes, wrote a story in one of the newspapers, saying that she was against any sort of boycott or demonstration or disruption of the Games by her people.

*

It is an Olympic axiom: There will always be problems before the party. Expect them, fix them or live with them, and don’t let them knock you off your tracks.

And they certainly shouldn’t here. Sydney is too far gone, and mostly in the right direction, for anything controllable to intervene.

It has a venue design and plan that probably will work better than those for any previous Games. Of the 28 Olympic sports, a Games-record 14 will be contested at one site, Olympic Park at Homebush Bay. The big moneymakers--athletics (track and field), basketball, gymnastics and swimming--will all be at Homebush.

The main stadium, 110,000-seat Stadium Australia, is so magnificent, it defies description. It seats 15,000 each in rectangular high-rise seating on each end and has two giant replay screens that cost $3.9 million each. The stadium is so massive, but with good sight lines from everywhere, that four 747s could fit on the stadium floor, side by side. The Australians broke ground for it in 1994, it cost $448.5 million and it came in on time and on budget.

They have tested the stadium a number of times with Australian football--one event drew 105,000--and reports are that the crowds were handled nicely. The metro rail that serves much of Sydney and almost all of the Olympic venues, has a main station right at Homebush Bay and is designed to handle 40,000 people an hour.

The gymnastics-basketball dome, adjacent to Stadium Australia, has been operational for some time. The swimming stadium, a huge building open to the public now, will make a final adjustment to get it to 17,500 seats by knocking out a side wall, giving sight lines to a rising 45-degree wing of 10,000 seats.

Even some of the so-called lesser sports have venues well above the the Olympic norm.

The cycling velodrome seats 6,000, has a roof shaped like a bicycle helmet and a racing surface of Baltic pine imported from Finland. The rowing venue is a man-made lake with its own connected warm-up lake and a tunnel for the rowers to walk from the warm-up lake to the competition lake. The Australians even put in a $4.5-million whitewater canoeing-kayaking course that seems certain to become one of those made-for-Olympic-TV spots. It is already being praised as one of the three best courses in the world, which makes sense since, because there are so few, this sport is not always contested in the Olympics.

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From the Baltic pine track, to whitewater canoeing-kayaking, to multimillion-dollar replay screens, it is obvious that no cost has been spared for the Sydney Games. That is already irking taxpayers in New South Wales, the state where Sydney is located. They were promised a profit and have now been told there is not likely to be one.

But such seems to be the case in all Olympics not run by Peter Ueberroth.

Sadly, since Ueberroth held the reins on the Los Angeles Games and turned a $232-million profit, the Olympics has apparently slipped back to a whatever-it-costs, need-to-do-business format.

One prime example is the Sydney bid committee’s deal with the IOC. The committee said that if it got the Games, it would pay for shipping all competitors’ canoes and kayaks, rowing shells and even sailing yachts. That was about $3.25 million of a proposed $7.8-million freight deal. The other $4.55 million will pay for the transport of the horses competing in equestrian events.

Dealing with horses for an Olympics is no small thing. The major fear is foreign horses bringing in disease. In the ’56 Melbourne Games, that was such a major problem, as well as the distance needed to travel to get to Australia, that the equestrian events were held in Stockholm.

This time, Sydney made the transportation part of its successful bid, and now the organizers, as well as those connected with any horse-related sport in the country, will hold their breath and hope they haven’t ended up paying for the introduction of a disaster.

“Our biggest fear is equine flu coming into the country,” said SOCOG official Greg Thomas. “Were that to happen, it could shut down all our horse racing for six months.”

*

To be an Olympic host city is to take risks, to clear hurdles and, sometimes, to even enjoy it a bit along the way. The Aussies, blessed with a sense of humor, are enjoying it.

Reg Gratton, SOCOG’s head of the main press center, was explaining here recently that the press working area was nowhere near ready yet, but would be in plenty of time, once “the animal show moves out in April.” The press center may come with a bit of an odor of cows, Gratton said, assuring that floors would be put down and the smell probably would go away well before Sept. 15.

“It could be worse,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “The press could be in that other pavilion, where they will have the pigs during the April show.

“We’re putting the sponsors and their hospitality tents there.”

* COMMENTARY

SYDNEY

GAMES

Sept. 15-Oct. 1

HIGH HOPES

Michael Knight, in charge of putting on the 2000 Games, is confident they’ll shine. Page 8