For nearly two months now a dedicated team has been making final preparations for an event of international significance that takes place every four years.
While similar teams have made similar sacrifices in other parts of the world, these diligent folk have single-mindedly focused on their own effort.
Although they long ago abandoned any vestige of an amateur ethos, they have still made uncommon sacrifices as they struggled with adversity to ensure their plans remained on track and that they peaked in time for the Olympics.
Last week they passed a critical point of no return in their preparation when, sustained only by junk food and soft drinks, these unlikely Olympians succeeded in putting together an exhaustively detailed website for ireland.com's coverage of Sydney 2000.
The website for the Olympics was launched in the early hours of the morning on August 31st, and today marks the beginning of ireland.com's 24-hour sports coverage, which will continue until Sydney 2000 concludes on October 1st.
Contents of the Sydney 2000 site include a section with extensive news on the Irish Olympic effort, profiles of all the Irish athletes competing in Sydney and Sonia O'Sullivan's "Olympic Countdown", the diary Ireland's foremost athlete of recent years has kept for The Irish Times over the past 18 months.
The newspaper's Olympic build-up articles, which have been featuring in Monday's sports supplement, are also on the site, along with additional articles from ireland.com journalists and international press agencies.
This mixture of print and Internet resources will continue once the games are underway. Reports from journalists working around the clock in Dublin will be enhanced by Web-exclusive contributions from the journalists The Irish Times is sending to Sydney.
Ireland.com's sports reporters will provide a 24-hour news service with live results available on the website, WAP phones and SMS. This coverage will be complemented by a daily gallery of images presented by Irish Times and agency photographers as a reflection of the day's events in Sydney.
About 10,000 athletes from 200 countries will compete in Sydney 2000. The task of presenting information on their performances is daunting, but a sport-by-sport, drop-down box provides a clear, uncluttered solution. It allows us to present news, results, schedules and notes for novices on every sport from swimming to synchronised swanning about (possibly only a demonstration sport this year).
The Olympic Games in Sydney will go down in history for many things.
Records will surely be broken (if howling winds around Homebush don't make them ineligible), scandalous drug stories may surface and some athletes may go home in shame as a result. It will also surely be remembered as the Internet Games. Atlanta in 1996 came just that bit too early to be exploited by the Web. The Internet has come of age since then, and Sydney lends itself to the medium.
FOR a start, the Web has matured to the point where it is rightly considered a viable source of information. Sport has been at the forefront of that development. This was starkly illustrated earlier this summer when the official Wimbledon Web site boasted an astonishing 960,000 hits per minute from eager fans seeking live score updates.
And sports events don't come any bigger than Sydney 2000. Add to that the time difference with Sydney, which makes the games difficult for traditional media to cover, and you see why Internet sports sites expect to be in the limelight for the next few weeks.
There are thousands of Olympic sites on the Web - the International Olympic Committee has started legal proceedings against 1,800 of them - and it will be interesting to see how they perform once the games are underway.
Our hope is that ireland.com becomes the natural choice for Irish Times readers to follow the Olympics live. Insomniacs can follow the heats of key events on ireland.com in the wee hours of the morning. Alternatively you can start your working day by following the progress of finals as they happen, courtesy of Irish Times sports reporters and guest analysts from the world of sport.
Donal Conaty is Sports Editor of ireland.com. He can be contacted at dconaty@irish-times.com