The moment Australia had anticipated for seven years had something of an anticlimactic feeling when the public-address announcer at Olympic Stadium disclosed that Cathy Freeman was the person who would light the cauldron a minute before the final torchbearer handed the flame to her.
Freeman stepped through a waterfall and into a pool of water to set ablaze the ring of fire that became a cauldron that would rise above her and the stadium during the Sept. 15 Opening Ceremony for the Games of the 27th Olympiad. Suddenly, an electrical malfunction stopped the ascending flame dead in its track.
Freeman stood there with the torch in her hand, a living tableau that seemed borrowed from Wagner’s Ring Cycle, an Aboriginal Valkyrie below a fiery Valhalla. Five minutes passed, a time when the Olympics themselves were stuck amid the failures of the recent past and whatever lay ahead. Freeman waited helplessly between what seemed a twilight of the Olympic gods and the dawn of the Olympics of the new millennium, in which she would become a goddess herself.
An ingenious backup system manned by two unflappable engineers took over, and the cauldron climbed smoothly to its position as the temporary summit of Olympus.
It had been a similarly bumpy trip for both Sydney’s Olympic organization and the idea of the Olympics as something worthy of organizing.
The two previous years had been a fitful progression. Organizational bungles. Fears of inadequate transport and dicey weather. Lagging ticket sales. Revelations of arrogance and corruption among the members of the International Olympic Committee and the cities that bid for the Games, with Sydney itself having paid $70,000 in last-minute “solidarity” to two African nations before beating Beijing for host rights by two IOC votes in 1993. Doping scandals involving the athletes whose heroic efforts were supposed to make everyone forget all that.
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The 16 days after the opening proved the Olympics somehow are bulletproof. The Summer Games remain a grand opera of continuing appeal even if, like the Ring Cycle, they are a myth dragged into excess that may overwhelm 2004 host Athens, the city where they were reborn 104 years ago.
When the cauldron Freeman lit was extinguished Sunday night, the glow over Sydney’s remarkable Olympic triumph would be far more lasting than Juan Antonio Samaranch’s proclamation Sunday that his final Olympics as International Olympic Committee president were the “best Olympic Games ever.”
They even made a case for reconciliation between white Australia and its indigenous population, whom Samaranch praised in his opening and closing speeches and Freeman represented with the torch and a gold medal. More pressure was applied on Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to apologize for the country’s past mistreatment of Aboriginals when the band Midnight Oil wore T-shirts reading “sorry” as they sang a lyric that said “The time has come to say fair’s fair” at the Closing Ceremony.
“Everything has gone perfectly, allowing people to live the experience they hoped for,” IOC member Richard Pound of Canada said. “People were willing to distinguish between the problems of the IOC and the performances of the athletes. These were the Games from central casting.”
The script will not be easy for Athens to follow. Its internal organization problems have been so great the IOC began considering alternative sites, and the Greek government begged for the eventual return of Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, who had led the Athens bid that won the Games in 1997.
Of the challenge her city now faces after Sydney’s brilliant high-wire act, organizing committee chief Angelopoulos-Daskalaki told the Australian Financial Review, “Oh, my God.”
Sydney coped with 500 more athletes than the expected 10,500. It moved 400,345 spectators in and out of Olympic Park without a major problem on Day 8 of the Games. It caught a break with the weather: One baseball game was delayed by rain, and the start of Sunday’s canoe-kayak races was pushed back six hours because of wind.
“I would rate the three Olympics I have competed in as: first Sydney, then Barcelona (1992), with Atlanta obviously third,” Russian swim legend and IOC member Alexander Popov said.
The fondest hope of the beleaguered IOC–that the athletes would push the officials and their bid-city scandal into the background–mainly was realized. Sydney wound up selling a record 87 percent of its available tickets. TV ratings were high everywhere but in the United States, where NBC compounded the problems related to the time difference by chopping its coverage into disjointed fragments and showing the highlight events near midnight on the East and West Coasts.
The high marks for the Aussies (Oy! Oy! Oy!) saved Samaranch and the other alleged guardians of the Olympic trust more criticism for having been caught in flagrante grabbo. The pompous conceits of IOC members such as Australia’s Kevan Gosper, who let his daughter usurp a torch-relay spot promised to an Australian girl of Greek heritage, did not escape skewering.
“The success of these Games was of paramount importance for the Olympic movement,” IOC member Thomas Bach of Germany said. “They showed how attractive the Games remain for the athletes and the media and the spectators and for a country. They sent an important message that the concentration on sports is what made the Games so special.”
While wildly cheering their own athletes, the Aussie fans rewarded everyone else with the applause their efforts deserved. The night Freeman won her gold medal in the 400 meters and Australian Tatiana Grigorieva a silver in the pole vault, the 112,524 people in Olympic Stadium gave a rousing ovation to Icelandic vault bronze medalist Vala Flosadottir.
“In the Cathy Freeman moment, you could see a nation together,” IOC General Secretary Francois Carrard said. “They came to welcome a national hero and also noticed an Icelandic woman. In every other country, she would have gone unnoticed.”
The Australians made everyone smile because they are unafraid to laugh at themselves.
A late-night spoof of the Olympics called “The Dream,” with an alternative mascot called “Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat,” became the must-see TV of the Games. The stars of that show, “Roy and HG,” did the prelude to the Closing Ceremony, followed by “lawnmower man.” The “Parade of Icons” at the Closing Ceremony included Elle McPherson, Greg Norman, the stars of a kids TV program called “Bananas in Pyjamas” and the transvestite drag queens of the film “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”
“I loved the people, I loved the sprit, I loved the events that weren’t marred by absenteeism,” said 1964 Olympic swimming gold medalist Donna de Varona of the United States.
The absentees included 27 Chinese athletes withdrawn from their team because of positive tests in domestic doping controls. More than a dozen other athletes were caught for doping before they reached Sydney.
In that group was Marion Jones’ husband, U.S. shot putter C.J. Hunter, who had announced Sept. 9 he was withdrawing from the Games because of a knee injury that had required surgery. It then was announced a week ago that Hunter also had four positive drug tests for the steroid nandrolone from June through August. That information touched off a media frenzy over alleged doping coverups by USA Track&Field and the U.S. Olympic Committee.
USOC Chief Executive Norman Blake called the often wildly inaccurate coverage of unreported U.S. doping positives a “witch hunt.” USATF Executive Director Craig Masback swore every athlete on the Olympic track team was clean, with the obvious exception of Hunter.
It made no difference. After years of U.S. insinuations about doping in other countries, the United States left the Olympics with both the most gold (39) and total medals (97) and an image as drug cheats.
Some have called the Sydney Olympics “The Drug Games,” which may be hyperbolic and could owe to improvements in testing. Three Bulgarian weightlifters lost medals after testing positive for a diuretic sometimes used to mask steroids. Andreaa Raducan, the 16-year-old Romanian gold medalist in the gymnastics all-around, lost that title after taking a cold medication containing ephedrine, a banned drug. There were seven busts in postcompetition tests and two others in out-of-competition testing.
“The IOC is trying to make drug testing as effective as possible,” Popov said. “But it’s up to the athletes whether they are going to play a fair game or not.”
There is no exaggerating the potential loss of faith in the Games caused by a perception that doping is widespread. Cathy Freeman may have relit the flame for a new millennium, but doping could undermine the possibility of Olympic regeneration begun in Sydney.
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