Sunday, October 01, 2000
Sydney showed how it's done
SYDNEY, Australia — G'night. G'night to you, Sydney, beautiful, luminous and full of yourself. In just eight years, we've seen how bad an Olympics can be, then just as quickly how good.
Hoist a Toohey's New to yourself. Applaud the gracious face you showed the world. It isn't easy making nice for 19 days. For you, it seemed natural.
Your Games worked. The drama was real. (So were the drug problems.) The spirit was genuine, the flavor was all-Olympian, all the time. When Ian Thorpe swam, you could practically see the city moving its arms and kicking its feet.
The phones worked. The buses were on time. Thank goodness the buses were on time.
This was Australia's Olympics. The rest of us were props for Mr. Thorpe, the brilliant swim mer who himself was just a prologue for Cathy Freeman, the transcendent Aboriginal sprinter.
Every Olympics needs a life-affirming moment, an instant when games are more than games, when they weave their way into the social fabric. When they remind us why we love them so much.
That was Ms. Freeman's task in Sydney. That she accepted it with such grace was remarkable. Try
pulling the weight of a continent without pulling a hamstring. That Ms. Freeman fulfilled the promise was beyond applause. As she tore around the oval, to a soundtrack of deafening cheers and a light show of 100,000 electronic flashes, she pulled an entire country into a better day.
That's the hope, anyway, that Ms. Freeman's triumph worked for everyone in Australia, that she will be their Jackie Robinson. Time will tell. But time stopped on that night at the Olympic Stadium. It had everything to do with everything Olympian.
The American successes were lost to Freeman-ia: Jenny Thompson adding to her gold collection, Gary Hall sharing gold with teammate Anthony Ervin in the 50 meters; Teresa Edwards' fifth basketball Olympics; Cheryl Haworth's dignity and bronze medal; Rulon Gardner's defeat of the legendary Russian wrestler, Alexander Karelin; the classy end of Michael Johnson's Olympic career; the bold attempt by Marion Jones to win five gold medals, and her courage in the face of the drug charges leveled against her husband.
Cincinnati provided its own dose of inspiration to the Sydney Games. Ricardo Williams Jr. showed us all the power of dedication and a quick left hand; Dante Craig beat the odds just to box here. The rowers all made it to the finals.
As remarkable as all of it was, it was eclipsed by the Aussies. They decided at some point these would be their Games. Not only would they have a hell of a time, they'd make sure everyone else did, too.
At night, Sydneysiders gathered at several locations around the city, to sit in grassy areas, picnic and watch TV screens as big as a barn. The night Aussie Grant Hackett touched the wall to win 1,500-meter swimming gold, a wail erupted as if it were New Year's Eve. It was the locals, a few thousand of them, watching the big screen, cheering under a full moon.
What a town. They could orchestrate the mood. They could tell the volunteers to smile; they could nudge the general population to do the same. But they couldn't fake the water that graces the city like pearls on a woman's neck.
It's that tourist brochure blue-green. It's clear and smashing against tall cliffs. It spills in from the South Pacific, between two giant heads of land, and rolls on for miles to the harbor. It's everywhere. In Cincinnati, we drive eight hours for a beach; Sydney has 70 of them.
You can hike 6 miles from the beach suburb of Manly to the Spit Bridge, up hills thick with fig and bamboo, past aquamarine beaches, to heights affording a postcard view of downtown. Paradise, 20 minutes from 4 million people.
Great Games, great people, great town.
Just one favor, before we go: Can we do this again in 2004?
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