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Knight Moves

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

If he could write a perfect script now, with 200 days to go until the opening of the Sydney Olympics, Michael Knight, the Australian government minister in charge of putting on the Games, says it would go like this:

No rain. The athletes “have a ball.” The Australian team wins 60 medals--up from 41 four years ago. And: “I didn’t have to give a press conference about a problem during the whole period of the Games.”

Knight paused. A longtime politician who has developed into an astute businessman, the type of man given to reflection on the endless manner of problems sure to confront him between now and the Oct. 1 end of the Games, he said with a wry smile, “I’m most confident about the 60 medals.”

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In an exclusive interview with The Times, Knight, the president of the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, readily conceded that SOCOG, as it is known, “will have problems between now and the end of the Games.”

But he was also quick to say he is “quietly confident” he has the Games on track to become the best ever--as IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was here two weeks ago, said they well could be.

Sydney was awarded the Games in September 1993. After nearly 6 1/2 years of preparation, Knight can survey these scenes from his empire and and see sound reason for optimism:

* VENUES--The major construction projects are, for the most part, finished.

The 110,000-seat stadium, site of the opening and closing ceremonies and the track and field events, is breathtaking in design and execution.

Lush green grass is growing at the 15,000-seat baseball stadium. The duller green artificial surface is in at the 10,000-seat tennis stadium. The aquatics center is already yielding the sounds of schoolkids and club meets.

Even those facilities much further down the priority scale are due to open on time, like the main press center--that is, after officials move the cattle and horses out after the annual Easter livestock show.

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“All we have to do is hose them down,” said Richard Palfreyman, a SOCOG spokesman. He paused. “And then, when the Games are over, we’ll hose them down twice and put the animals back in.”

* DOPING--Australian scientists may be zeroing in on a test for EPO, a banned performance-enhancing hormone that is undetectable using current tests.

Earlier this month, the IOC signed a deal with the Australian government to promote such research. Samaranch took pains when he was here two weeks ago with the IOC’s ruling Executive Board to note he hoped a test would be ready by September.

* TRANSIT--The Games’ transportation system, a complex web of buses and trains, is ready to be rolled out.

If all goes well, Olympic Park--located in a western suburb, Homebush Bay--will be about a half-hour ride from downtown Sydney.

If not, Sydney will have a transit debacle like the one that dogged the Atlanta Games in 1996.

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In Sydney, the task has been turned over to a special government agency, the Olympic Roads and Transport Authority. ORTA has been granted wide authority to keep things moving.

A series of events at Olympic Park will test the system.

“Transport is the biggest challenge any Olympic city ever faces,” Knight said.

* SECURITY--Police in New South Wales, the state in southeastern Australia in which Sydney is located, have a streamlined command-and-control system unlike anything in the United States.

In the U.S., local, state and federal law enforcement agencies readied for the Atlanta Games. In New South Wales, there’s one agency, the New South Wales police.

To be sure, they have asked for outside help from, among others, the Australian military and the U.S. FBI.

The main concern, of course, remains a terrorist attack. But Australia is an island nation, a long way away from everywhere else, which logically reduces--but hardly eliminates--the risk.

Paul McKinnon, commander of the police department’s Olympic Security Command Center, said, “There [are] terrorist plots brewing all over the world. The threat that applies to our part of the Southern Hemisphere, according to international sources, is unaffected by it--so far. Now that doesn’t mean we sit [back] and do nothing.”

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A key worry remains an attack like the one during the 1996 Games at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, which killed a woman and injured 100 others. U.S. authorities have charged survivalist Eric Rudolph in the blast, along with the 1997 bombings in Atlanta of an abortion clinic and a gay and lesbian bar. Rudolph remains a fugitive.

“I am extraordinarily confident the training and preparations that we have done for the higher-spectrum order of politically motivated violence [and] terrorism is as good as we can get,” McKinnon said.

He added, “With that mantle of security thrown over my city, my state and my country, it should detect any of the lesser degrees of violence, whether it’s politically motivated or otherwise.”

* FINANCES--The SOCOG budget is balanced and reasonably final.

In a series of meetings that coincided with the appearance in town of the IOC’s Executive Board, the SOCOG board approved a $1.5-billion budget. That’s slightly under Atlanta’s 1996 budget, $1.7 billion.

Knight said he expects no further significant movement in either revenues or expenses.

The infrastructure tab for the Games is an added $2.1 billion, split between public and private sources, Knight said.

Like virtually all Olympic Games budgets, Sydney’s $1.5-billion figure was reached after a series of complex steps that would tax students of both political science and accounting.

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In early February, for instance, Games organizers ceded responsibility for operating the Olympic venues to the government-run Olympic Coordination Authority.

That was a trade-off for accepting a budget-rescue package devised by Knight--a package needed largely because of a huge projected shortfall caused by a massive overestimate of available seats.

The final budget also reflects complicated--albeit entertaining and ultimately revealing--

dickering over sponsorship money.

Hoping to maximize revenues, SOCOG twice raised its sponsorship targets, meeting the first revised goal but falling about $70 million shy of the last one.

In what must amount to Australian for chutzpah, SOCOG management had then declared the marketing program a failure. In town for the Executive Board meeting, IOC Vice President Dick Pound of Canada called that “nuts,” saying that the program, which generated about $865 million for SOCOG in local and global sponsorships, was the most successful in Olympic history.

The next day, with television cameras rolling before the IOC Executive Board meetings began, Knight sought Pound out and planted a kiss on his cheek--

immediately defusing any tension.

“Dick obviously needed a bit of love and attention, and I thought as a good host it was important to give him some,” Knight said.

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Pound said, “It was certainly the most exciting part of my day.”

As Knight’s deft handling of the incident with Pound underscored, it’s clear to everyone connected with the Games--both in Australia and abroad--who’s in charge Down Under.

A controversy over a proposed Games ticketing plan dogged SOCOG for most of the second half of 1999 but Knight has finessed the situation to emerge this year with more authority than ever--giving the Games the sort of dominant personality that, as Peter Ueberroth demonstrated in Los Angeles in 1984, can be critical to success.

The 47-year-old Knight, active in New South Wales politics since the early 1980s, has been the state minister for the Olympics since 1995 and president of SOCOG since 1996.

The controversy erupted after it was revealed that SOCOG had kept about 500,000 tickets out of a public pool to offer to corporate clients at up to three times face value. Again, SOCOG was essentially hoping to maximize revenues--in this case, however, at the expense of ordinary Australians, many of whom feel what Knight now calls an “entitlement” to a ticket to the Games.

The vast majority of tickets have since been returned for normal sale. The controversy quieted considerably with the December departure of the ticket manager.

Knight is acutely aware that the Games will be, as he puts it, “a litmus test for how people view Australia,” with ramifications for tourism and other industries.

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Asked if he feels pressure, he said, “Of course. I mean, look, if you don’t feel the pressure, you’ve either got no pulse or you’re a psychopath. You’ve got to feel the pressure.”

He added, “That’s different than folding under the pressure.”

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