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BILL BRYSON

A CITY UNDER STARTER'S ORDERS

Bill Bryson, the bestselling author, will be contributing regularly to The Times during the Olympic Games. His first bulletin from Sydney reports on how the city, its beer dispensers and its very well-informed bus drivers are ready for the show to begin.

Of all the Olympic sports that have come and gone - and there have been more than you might think - I believe my favourite would have to be the event known as plunge for distance. A feature of the 1904 Games in St Louis, it required competitors to dive into a pool from a standing position and, while maintaining a posture of perfect rigidity, to float as far as they could for as long as they could without drawing breath.

Photograph: ALLSPORT

I don't know whether the competitors took turns at this or went in all at once, but I would like to think the latter as it presents such an agreeable image of a pool full of inert bodies drifting about in a more or less random manner, gently bumping into the sides and each other. In any case, even by the extremely accommodating standards of the early Olympics, the sport was deemed too ridiculous to be sustainable and was discontinued at the next Games.

Also failing to last long in Olympic competitions were club swinging, croquet, rope climbing, tug of war, live pigeon shooting, motor-boat racing, two-handed javelin throw and the 100m swim for sailors, which featured at the first modern Games in Athens in 1896 and then was heard of no more. I mention all this because I have just been reading about the first days of the modern Olympics and it's hard not to be struck by the openness, the village-fête-like simplicity, of the Games then compared with now.

In those days, Olympics were small-scale affairs - Athens had barely 200 competitors, as against more than 10,000 at Sydney - and so easygoing that spectators could actually hope to take part. The entrants in the 1904 marathon, for instance, included two Zulu dancers who happened to be in St Louis on a cultural exchange and entered on a whim. Supervision was likewise a trifle casual. Michel Théato, the winner of the 1900 marathon in Paris, is reputed to have used his knowledge of the city's geography to introduce a number of useful shortcuts down back alleys and side lanes.

Even more enterprising was the American Fred Lorz, who completed the 1904 marathon looking uncannily fresh. It turned out that he had accepted a lift from a passing motorist, who had dropped him just outside the stadium after conveying him 11 miles. I think it is safe to say that we will not see those days again.

Now, of course, the Olympics are serious business. Sydney has spent billions on sleek new sporting venues and other related facilities, and for that kind of money people expect to experience more than the gentle clack of croquet balls or the startled squawk of pigeons being blown to smithereens in flight.

'That there are people who devote years to perfecting the ability to poke someone in the chest with a bendy stick before being poked in turn has long seemed to me one of life's amazements'

Yet the basic ridiculousness of the enterprise is intact. Between now and October 1, when the Games conclude, hundreds of thousands of people will travel great distances, vast and unquantifiable sums will be expended, millions of words will be written, and up to four billion people at a time will be glued to their television screens as the world once more becomes gripped with determining which human beings can leap furthest into a sandpit or make their legs go fastest or hurl various improbable objects the greatest distance.

That there are people prepared to devote years of concentrated effort to perfecting the ability to fling themselves high into the air with a pole or turn backflips on a narrow beam or try to poke someone in the chest with a bendy stick before they are poked in turn has long seemed to me one of life's amazements. That four-fifths of the planet's inhabitants are willing to become fixated with such pursuits for two weeks every four years is clearly at the very bounds of plausibility.

And yet, as always, I will be right there myself, cheering on the finalists in the men's springboard wrestling or ladies' 400-metre backwards hurdles or whatever other inane and forgotten sport they place before me because, well, it's the Olympics and that's what you do.

But mostly what I am looking forward to is the spectacle of it all. Sydney is about to undergo the most crowded and intense, the most centre-of-the-universe and exciting couple of weeks it is ever likely to see. Who would not want to be part of that? Not me, brother. I'll be there and I intend to enjoy every frantic moment of it.

There is, of course, a certain irony for the host city that its moment of greatest international visibility occurs when it is at its least normal.

Whatever Sydney may be over the next two weeks, it will not be Sydney. The most dubious of all the beliefs behind the present Games is that this is Sydney's chance to show itself to the world. In fact, very nearly the opposite is true. The Games are really much more a chance for Sydney to see what the world is like. For two weeks Sydney - normally the most genial and laid back of cities - will experience situations that most of the rest of us have already: stressed and harried servers, packed airports, strained public transport systems, creeping traffic, appalling queues.

There is no question that it is going to be a challenge. On Thursday and Friday of next week, Sydney's Kingsford-Smith Airport expects to receive or dispatch 104,000 travellers, vastly more than it has ever tried to process before - and that's only a warm-up for October 2 when no fewer than 134,000 passengers will pass through. Altogether during the Olympic period some 720,000 people will take part in what will be the most memorable period in the airport's history.

The Peace Roo - one of eight limited-edition Olympic posters

Meanwhile, 34 million train trips are forecast to be taken in greater Sydney during the Olympics - a cool 20 million more than usual - as 5.5 million spectators try to find their way to 321 scheduled events covering 28 sports at some two dozen venues. Then there are the tens of thousands of people - the 10,300 athletes, 5,100 coaches and trainers, 15,000 media people, 100,000 workers and volunteers - who must be moved about the city in a smooth and timely fashion, plus the hundreds of thousands who will just show up at Olympic Park or the city centre because, well, it's the Olympics and that's what you do. The question, obviously, is how well Sydney will handle all this.

My feeling is that it will do very well. To begin with, Australians are ace fretters, which in a context such as this is no bad thing. The American approach to a big event like the Olympics is to expect everything to go right, to be dumbfounded when it does not, and then to move swiftly into denial. By such means have the American people managed to transform the Atlanta Games - which really were just one embarrassing cockup after another - into one of the great success stories of the modern Olympics movement, a model for all subsequent Games. You will scarcely find an American now who believes otherwise.

The Australian approach, on the other hand, is to do nearly everything right and then to persuade themselves that they can't possibly have.

Australians are not used to having all the world's eyes on them at once, and it is clearly an unnerving prospect. Huge amounts of newspaper space have been devoted to all the things that might go wrong. It is literally not possible to name a catastrophic contingency, short of asteroid impact or nuclear attack, that hasn't been mooted and exhaustively analysed in the nation's press in the long run-up to the Games.

One of the Sunday papers ran a lively report warning - indeed, all but promising - that the Games could be disrupted by "virulent new strains of influenza." The article observed that according to a government report, an influenza outbreak "will occur in the foreseeable future" somewhere in greater Asia. And it provided a helpful scenario of how the contagion would spread, beginning with a Chinese athlete sniffling ominously in the Olympic Village and finishing with 60,000 Australians dead and the Olympics in a shambles. A sadly prescient report: Sydney is in the grip of its annual flu epidemic, two children have already died and athletes are being told to get vaccinated.

Predictably, not all has gone as smoothly as it might. Sydney's trains in recent months have shown a disconcerting tendency to derail or even, on one occasion, to burst mysteriously into flames. Twice in the same period power outages at the airport have left flight controllers staring at blank radar screens. The most recent of these, on August 2, disrupted flights for 80 minutes.

Then there have been the constant embarrassments foisted on an appalled nation by the Olympic organisers, as when (to take just one example) Kevan Gosper, the senior Australian member on the International Olympic Committee, had a little Greek-Australian girl bumped from the torch relay so that his own daughter could be the first Australian to carry the Olympic flame.

Yet despite all this, Sydney is probably more ready for the Games than any city has ever been. Nearly all the really important matters - the building of the venues, the improvements to infrastructure, the general slicking up of the city - have been carried off with panache and dispatch.

Altogether the city has lavished some £3.5 billion on itself - £1.5 billion or so on official improvements, from new street furniture and newspaper kiosks to all the Olympic venues, and another £2 billion on private developments, including 20 new hotels.

At Homebush Bay, ten miles west of the city centre, where once stood the largest abattoir in the southern hemisphere and several other noisome industrial enterprises, there has arisen a gleaming white city of sporting palaces - aquatic centre, tennis centre, baseball park, mighty domed arena and much more - with sunny plazas in between and a stylish pedestrian boulevard bisecting the whole. At the heart of it all is the impossibly

vast and fetching eminence known as Stadium Australia.

In July, along with nearly 110,000 others, I was at Stadium Australia for a rugby match between Australia and New Zealand, and I can confidently report that if the other Olympics facilities are even one-third as good as the stadium, then this will be the best Olympics ever. The sight lines were excellent, the seats exceedingly comfortable, the sound system and lights the best I have seen in any sporting venue.

But do you know what made the deepest impression on me? At the beer counters, they had a machine that could automatically fill a tray of 32 beer glasses in seconds - not very neatly, but at the rate they were selling beer they could afford to slop a few gallons. Because the beers were ready and waiting on the counter, you simply took as many as you wanted or could carry (essentially the same thing) and paid at a checkout line. Getting beer thus was not only painless and swift, but actually enjoyable. Thanks to a little forethought and the application of a useful technology, a potential impediment to sporting happiness had been removed.

Now I am not quite so crass as to believe that if you get the beer right all else will follow, but you do have to concede that a facility that can keep 110,000 rugby fans in drink is probably up to most challenges. In any case, it seemed to me wonderfully illustrative of the million details that have been thought through and taken into account long before the games have begun.

Mind you, the real test will be the Olympics themselves. After the rugby match, I joined the shuffling throngs being funnelled into the station to catch trains back to the city. The crush of people was terrific - it is one thing to sit with 100,000 people in a stadium, quite another to try to ride home with them all - but remarkably good-natured and patient. As a test of the system, it seemed to work pretty well. I was back in the city in about 90 minutes. But this crowd was made up almost exclusively of Aussies and Kiwis - people with a certain devotion to orderliness. What will it be like when there are five times that number of people at Olympic Park and many of them come from places where queuing is not by tradition patient and orderly?

Speaking as someone who went to EuroDisney soon after its opening and watched in amazement as hundreds of well-dressed, well-heeled Continental visitors did everything in their powers to circumvent long queues - including sneaking on to rides through the exits - I can tell you with absolute assurance that the scope for disorder is vast. Add in tens of thousands of visitors who cannot follow English-language signs or instructions, and it seems a safe bet that some will be found wandering in perplexity through the vast spaces beyond the Blue Mountains.

On the whole, however, the preparations seem to be as impeccable as any city could possibly make them. Scarcely a detail appears to have been overlooked. I have just been watching a training video called Bus Driver Olympic Routes: Sydney 2000, which is a series of short films made with a camera mounted on a vehicle bonnet showing prospective bus drivers the various routes they must follow. Since Sydney sprawls over some 1,500 square miles and incorporates nearly 800 named suburbs, and since many of these drivers are being brought in from far-off places like Perth and Darwin and thus are about as well acquainted with the city as the average visitor from Windsor or Duluth, this is almost certainly not a bad idea.

What is striking about these films is that they are excellent - far better than they need to be. They even include an original musical score with a beat so perky that you begin to feel that driving from Circular Quay to Parramatta might be pleasurable. The accompanying commentary, moreover, not only points out the landmarks along each route, but adds wonderfully unexpected snippets of extraneous information. After noting, for instance, that the route from George Street to Homebush Bay passes the Gladesville Hospital on the left, the commentator cheerily adds: "Built in 1838, the Gladesville Hospital was first known as Tar Ban Creek Asylum for the Mentally Insane."

When a drivers' training video includes catchy tunes and the history of sanitoria passed en route, you know - and I am being entirely serious here - that this is a Games people care about.

I don't imagine that ever has a country been more gripped by the preparations for an event of any kind other than perhaps a war. According to the archivists of the Sydney Morning Herald, between January 1995 and the present, the newspaper has run just under 8,000 articles on or about the Sydney Games. Assuming the average length of those articles to be 750 words, that works out at 5.5 million words of pre-Olympics coverage - about as many words as would be found in two metres of shelved books in a library. Lot of words.

Inevitably, this has led to a certain amount of statistical overload. So many numbers have been bandied about for so long from so many sources that it is impossible to know which ones to believe. For the number of additional people expected in the city on an average day during the Olympics, for example, I have seen estimates of 400,000, 650,000, 750,000 and 900,000. Needless to say, that's quite a span of possibility.

The fact is nobody knows how many people will wander into the city on any given day just to have a look round. Nobody knows how many Sydneysiders who would normally be in the city will instead stay away. Nobody knows what the weather will be like or how hard it will be to get a cab.

That is, of course, what makes it all so exciting. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Nobody can say how it's going to go. Nobody knows a damn thing really.

But I will tell you this. It's going to be great.

Sydney - a city at ease with itself ...