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Sunday, October 1, 2000
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DOWN UNDER BOWS OUT ON TOP OF THE WORLD
BACK IN THE BUSINESS OF WINNING

Down Under bows out on top of the world

Oh well. After 17 successive g’days - very good days indeed - it was time to say g’night. I suppose we did have to have Kylie, but by this stage I was prepared to forgive Australia anything. The president of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, closed his last Olympic Games tonight, and spoke the words he conspicuously failed to say in Atlanta four years ago: that these were the best Olympic Games ever.

I don’t suppose any could possibly disagree with that - certainly not in Sydney. You wouldn’t dare, you couldn’t bear too. We’ve all got totally carried away on a diet of mind-bogglingly splendid sport and mind-bogglingly relentless good vibes.

Closing ceremonies are odd things, and this one mixed a passage of ridiculously pretentious guff from a bunch of Greek priestesses - the Games go to Athens in four years - with huge chunks of invigorating Australian self-mockery. They carried Kylie Minogue into the stadium on a giant flip-flop - thong in Australian vernacular - for example, and Men at Work sang their song Land Down Under “where beer does flow and men chunder”.

Then there was a parade of drag queens, commemorating the film Priscilla Queen of the Desert: a celebration of the culture that inspired the saying: Come to Australia where men are men (and women). And right at the beginning, we had Ray and HG, a pair of comics whose alternative Olympic television show has been the talk of the Games. And they even bought their alternative mascot to the stadium, none other than Fatso The Fat-Arsed Wombat.

Excuse me if the coarseness offends. But Australia had the guts to debunk the twaddle that goes with the Olympic Games, to take away the pomposity and celebrate concepts that mean far more to humanity than banalities about world peace. That is to say: humour.

So the audience participation kit given to every member of the audience included an esky: an esky being the thing that keeps your tinnies cool when you’re having a barbie. It was a nicely ironical celebration of what Australia is, not what Australia pretends to be. And that has been very much the tone of the entire Games. It has been something of a coming-of-age ceremony: a rite of passage from adolescence to maturity. This is what we are, we’re not embarrassed about it, or trying to be like anybody else.

Australia has long pretended to be a grown-up country, but the pretence showed: it was all a bit like a schoolboy smoking a fag on the train with his cap hidden in his pocket. In fact, the unconvincing swagger of maturity has been the pretend independence of a adolescent: a strained relationship with the parent-country, resentful but at the same time needful. This goes with a hero-worshipping attitude to the Big Boy they truly admire and seek to imitate at every opportunity - the admired big boy in question being the United States.

The Olympic Games marks, perhaps, the beginning of the end of that period. Just as the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 were the signal for Japan to change both the world’s and its own view of itself and its place among the nations, so the same might be true of the Sydney Olympic Games of 2000.

These were 17 days in which they Showed The World. After seven years of back-biting, cynicism and terror, the greatest sporting event the world has ever seen took place and it was wonderful: 10,500 athletes, 200 nations, day after day of treats for any who has sporting blood in the veins. There has been a frank air of disbelief that has carried through the Games from day to day: another glorious day in which Australia didn’t stuff it up. Australia has lived through a period of enchantment, nothing less.

Occasionally, when playing cricket, I have found that mysterious thing called line and length. At such times I have wanted to speak to nobody, to do nothing but bowl, perhaps even to cease breathing in deadly fear that the magic would break and I would be back to bowling the usual kind of rubbish.

Sydney has been in exactly this state for the past 17 days, not daring to believe that everything was great, and the world was watching and everything was OK. OK? Everything was bloody great. And so we ended unabashedly with the massed signing of Waltzing Matilda, and your correspondent, not a great joiner-inner, joined in. (Who, by the way, was the bloody fool who insisted on Advance Australia Fair as the national anthem when the real one is this song about a suicidal sheep-stealer?)

You can always silence a gloating Aussie - and you can be sure that he is gloating about sport - by invoking the national embarrassment known as the Cultural Cringe. As Dame Edna said, Australians are good at sport because of “the sun, the diet the healthy outdoor life and the total lack of any intellectual stimulation whatsoever”. Remember it for the next Ashes series for it never fails.

But with the self-mocking humour, the celebration of larrikinism and lawn-mowers, the achievment of the Games, it seemed that Australia is beginning to transcend the Cultural Cringe. No huffy standing on our dignity. This is what Australia is - eskies and thongs and all.

This is an ardent-hearted place. The Olympic Games are the world’s biggest celebration of ardent-heartedness. I think the Games should be held here every four years in perpetuity.

Simon Barnes
The Times

Back in the business of winning

Ten days ago, when the golden renaissance in Britain’s Olympic fortunes was only just beginning, Matthew Pinsent seemed to sense that something momentous was about to occur. Still pumping with adrenaline from his own triumph as part of the coxless four, he spied Alan Green, the BBC commentator, by the side of the regatta course at Penrith Lakes. “How does this compare to the Ryder Cup,” Pinsent asked with a grin. “Better,” Green said. Pinsent repeated the reply for effect. “Better.”

Today, better became best. With a glorious final flourish on the last day of these magical Olympic Games, gold medals for Audley Harrison in the super-heavyweight boxing category and for Stephanie Cook in the modern pentathlon left Britain’s athletes - mocked and ridiculed after bringing home a solitary gold from Atlanta four years ago - bathing in a sea of records and superlatives.

If the Sydney Games, with all their uplifting camaraderie, their volunteer altruism and their inspirational struggles, have begun the process of dragging the Olympics out of their death spiral and nudging them back towards the pinnacle of world sport, so they have resuscitated British interest in an event that had lost the fascination it once held. Suddenly, the Olympics mean more to us than cheering Steve Redgrave to another gold.

Harrison and Cook had had breakfast together in the cavernous canteen at the Olympic Village this morning and, as far as statisticians of British Olympic achievements are concerned, they must have poured nectar on their cornflakes and complemented their streaky bacon with a few spoonfuls of ambrosia. Their victories in their respective sports, which meant Britain had won five gold medals in the past three days, made these Britain’s most successful Games for 80 years. In real terms, they were our best Olympics ever.

So as Kylie Minogue, Greg Norman, Elle Macpherson and the rest brought these Olympics that have seemed like a wonderful dream to an end in an emotional closing ceremony, it felt as though they had ushered in a new era of sporting achievement in Britain. It has burnished us in gold like the waters of Sydney Harbour in the light of last night’s fireworks display. Not since Antwerp in 1920, when the youth of the world was scarred by war, have British athletes amassed 11 gold medals at an Olympic Games, as Redgrave, Harrison, Cook, Denise Lewis, Jonathan Edwards and the rest of them have here.

For all the glory of the "Chariots of Fire" Olympics in Paris 1924 with Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, for all the achievements of that golden era of middle-distance running when Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram seemed to have cornered the market in victory, Britain have never had it so good as here in New South Wales. At the Atlanta Games, which seemed damned from start to finish by American parochialism, Britain finished 36th in the medal table. This time, the nation’s athletes lifted it to tenth.

The Games were full ground-breaking British feats. Harrison became the first British boxer to win Olympic gold since Chris Finnegan managed it in 1968 and the first heavyweight to triumph since Ronald Rawson in 1920. Shirley Robertson became the first female British sailor to win an individual sailing gold when she held her nerve to beat the world champion, Margriet Matthysse, in the Europe class on Friday.

Redgrave’s record of a gold medal in an endurance event at five consecutive Olympics is unique in the modern era. Pinsent, now with three golds himself, is the most likely to get close to it. Jonathan Edwards became the first British triple jump winner since a conscript Irishman leapt longest nearly a century ago. Lewis ran the 1,500 metres, the last event of the heptathlon, when she could hardly walk because of an ankle injury, to clinch her gold medal. Athletes who seem to have made a habit of coming second have chosen Sydney to step up.

Part of the intoxication of the British success has been that it has spanned the gamut of our society. From Cook yesterday and her background of not just Oxford University but Cambridge, too, to Harrison and his one-time employment as a nightclub bouncer, to Edwards and his Christian convictions, to Jason Queally, the Lancastrian sprint cyclist who once worked as a barrow boy, and to Robertson whose father taught her his love of sailing from a career in the Royal Navy, they have emphasised the eclecticism of British triumphs.

Typical of that was the fact that Tim Foster, a well-spoken public schoolboy and a team-mate of Redgrave and Pinsent, leapt off a shuttle bus from the Olympic Village yesterday to watch Harrison fight the last fight of the afternoon in central Sydney. Tennis star Tim Henman turned up to watch the hockey. Redgrave was up early the day after his own win to cheer on the coxed eights as they, too, rowed to glory. There has been a feeling of mutual support, of pooled success, that has not existed quite so selflessly before.

The thread that has bound many of these athletes together is the funding from the National Lottery which has allowed them to devote themselves to their sport without the nagging worry that their dedication is going to leave them bankrupt or, just as debilitating, condemn them to life as second-class citizens, impoverished because of their calling. Time and again, when British gold medal-winners at these Games have taken the stage at their celebratory press conferences, they have emphasised the difference that lottery funding made to them.

After he had recited a poem about "reaching inside to find the Olympian", Harrison traced his own improvement to last January when he was awarded a scholarship that enabled him to start training full-time and discard his bouncing duties. “We have proved now that Great Britain can be great again,” Harrison said. “Let’s keep embracing our athletes and allowing them to excel and then we will only get better and better.”

They have excelled, too. On land and at sea, at the Olympic stadium, at the velodrome, at Penrith Lakes - where the eight emulated the coxless four, in the harbour, at the shooting range - where Richard Faulds won the double trap, at the baseball stadium - where, improbably, the clixax of the modern pentathlon was staged, and in the boxing ring, the triumphs have come alike.

”Two eyes aren’t enough,” an elderly man said as we watched the fireworks exploding all over Sydney from the top floor of a hotel. That is what it has felt like to be British and be bombarded with gold these last two weeks in the Olympic city.

Oliver Holt
The Times