The Olympic Games are just two months away and Sydney is gearing up for the big event
Grant Shimmin in Sydney
I was finding it a little difficult to believe. I mean, here I was in the city where it would soon all be happening and there seemed to be nothing to tell me about it, no giant posters of Ian Thorpe or Susie O’Neill on the walls as I passed the amnesty bins, where any food passengers bring in must be dumped, or declared at customs.
I confess that fatigue may have caused me to miss something, but in truth, the arrivals area of Sydney’s Kingsford Smith airport seemed to have changed little in the 16 months since I’d been through it with the cricketers en route to New Zealand. As I waited at the baggage carousel, passing a brief inspection by the beagle searching for drugs, a major luggage pile-up occurred just under the chute disgorging suitcases from the Kuala Lumpur-Sydney flight. No airport official appeared to help rectify the problem and without the intervention of a few passengers, serious damage to the mechanism could have occurred – not to mention to people’s luggage.
I later learned that these carousels, at a glance decidedly inferior to those in the state-of-the-art new airport in the Malaysian capital, were a major point of concern for the Olympics. They should be. But maybe that’s being a little petty, consciously looking for things to criticise. Fourteen hours later I was seeing what it was really all about and I’d have had to be comatose not to be impressed.
Sydney’s Olympic Park at Homebush Bay gives one a good idea of the sheer magnitude of the world’s greatest multi-sport festival. A trip to the 17th-floor observation deck of the Novotel Hotel, slap-bang in the centre of the precinct, affords a panoramic view of an area that once housed the state abattoir and, in the 1970s, was the scene of uncontrolled dumping. Basically, it was a shambles.
Now it represents arguably the most impressive collection of sports facilities within such a small area in the world, though it’s a lot more than that. The Olympic Park site covers 760ha, of which 450 are to be so-called Millennium Parkland, ensuring that the greenery which characterises Sydney’s suburbs, especially as one moves further from the city centre, will remain when the games are just a memory. Because of a strict set of environmental criteria, which were included in the city’s bid document, none of the waste that had been dumped previously was allowed to be moved away either, so some lateral thinking had to come into play on the part of the developers to ensure another dumping site wouldn’t be created somewhere else. The waste found on the site has been gathered to form a series of large mounds, which were then covered with clay and topsoil and landscaped to become features in the precinct.
Perhaps the view from the Novotel puts my initial impressions at the airport into perspective. From one side, one has a perfect view of the magnificent Stadium Australia, where the Springboks will soon put their Tri-Nations aspirations on the line; the baseball stadium; the Sydney Superdome, which is set to be packed for the Olympic gymnastics and, beyond that, the condo- style Athletes Village, which will become the Sydney suburb of Newington – “the world’s largest solar- powered suburb”, according to organisers – after the Paralympics in October. The swanky Olympic Park railway station, where hundreds of thousands of spectators will alight during the games, lies close to the stadium and within easy walking distance of any facility in Sydney’s Olympic heart.
>From the other point of the oval-shaped 17th floor, one has a view of the superb Sydney International Aquatic Centre, the hockey stadium beyond that and the tennis stadium, where cool air will be pumped on to the centre court to prevent the kind of overheating that often occurs at the Australian Open in neighbouring Melbourne.
It’s on this side that things are put into perspective. In the distance, one can make out the Harbour Bridge and the city’s impressive skyline. So sure, Sydney is hosting the Olympics and it’s arguably the biggest single event ever to take place in Australia. But let’s also be realistic. The Olympics are by no means the only thing Sydney has going for it and that bridge and the beautiful harbour it spans are a constant reminder of that.
So is the fact that it is such a multi- cultural city. September’s games and the Paralympics that follow a fortnight later will represent a gathering of nearly all the world’s nations, but the truth is a high proportion of them are already permanently represented in Australia’s biggest city. And living side by side in relative harmony as well.
So if the first thing one sees when getting off a plane in Sydney isn’t a gaudy sign blaring out to visitors that this is the Olympic city, that’s not entirely surprising. It may well be the Olympic city, but the city is far more than the Olympics.
Grant Shimmin’s trip to Sydney was made possible by Malaysia Airlines