Sydney woke up yesterday to the grim reality that after six years of meticulous planning, it's still going to take a photo finish to determine if the deadline for the start of the 27th Olympic Games here tomorrow comes before the end of the preparations.

Forget about the torch and its circuitous journey to the Olympic city. You know for certain that the great day is dawning when stories of transport chaos begin to hit the local press.

Like Barcelona and Atlanta in recent years, Sydney is discovering that even the most carefully laid plans can come up short.

Unfortunate is the only word to ascribe to the toxic chemical spill which fouled up the ventilation system at the city's international airport yesterday and for two hours caused chaos on the busiest day in its history. Excuses are less valid in the context of inadequate road transport.

It was bad enough that on the first day of the grand scheme to convey the crowds to Olympic Park that a man should jump from a stalled bus, proclaiming to all and sundry that in the future he'd prefer to walk the 20 km to get him to the main stadium in time.

More embarrassing by far, however, was the disclosure that hundreds of the drivers recruited by a private company, Bus 2000, are threatening to quit because of overwork, bad rostering and generally poor conditions.

A condition of employment for the drivers brought in from rural New South Wales is that they received two meals, one hot and one cold, each day. But on Tuesday, 250 of them went without a second meal because transport managers told the caterers that only 500 meals were required.

This and the fact that it's often as many as eight to a room in their dormitory has caused trade union officials to warn that unless working conditions are improved for the drivers, the service, bad as it is, will deteriorate still further before the start of the Games.

Not all the problems, however, are down to management. Conceding that many of those charged with the responsibility of transporting visitors to the Games are themselves unfamiliar with the city, a spokesman said starkly: "There will always be drivers who take the wrong turn but we're trying to minimise this."

After an unwanted two-hour cab drive through downtown Sydney on my arrival here on Wednesday, during which we passed my hotel on at least four occasions, I can readily testify to the problems of drivers who simply don't know the area. And it's done nothing at all to keep Sydney's road traffic on the move in spite of promises by John Coates and his organising committee that improvements will be made to complement the new rail system linking the centre of the city to the state-of-the-art Olympic complex.

Many thousands of Sydney's citizens may have abandoned their city to the tourists, but if the hope was that their going would free up the streets it certainly hasn't shown.

Mark you, the presence of the expected influx of visitors is not immediately discernible and taxi drivers in particular are not amused. "I was a lot more excited about these Games two months ago than I am now," said one. "I've had busier nights in the depths of winter."

Nor have the restaurateurs done much to improve matters for those who travelled in great expectations, by adhering to traditional early closing hours. On Wednesday, just 48 hours before the opening ceremony, the centre of the city was pretty much deserted at midnight.

The exception was in and around the precincts of those plush hotels housing the high and mighty of the Olympic movement who hustled and bustled to contrive an atmosphere wholly out of sync with the indifference of the general public beyond.

Here, everyone, it seems, has a name tag hanging from his neck. From the top strata of the IOC to the lower ranks of the thousands of voluntary workers, from journos to joiners, people, it seems, feel the need to be reminded of who they really are.

If apathy rules on the streets of downtown Sydney, it's a lot different out in Olympic Park where Australians are justly proud of the magnificent facility they have put in place for the first great sporting spectacular of the millennium.

Young and old stood to admire the superb complex on a site which once housed the municipal slaughterhouse. That is the towering monument to the vision of those who, after a gap of 44 years, had again established Australia in the eyes of the world.

However, there were those in the media village, home to close on 3,000 journalists and sundry personnel, who had their own reasons to rue the call, if only for an hour or so yesterday.

Over the years, I've watched the occasional deprivation in facilities, usually of the liquid type. But yesterday, quiet men were moved to mutter some dark words at the spectacle of vast dining halls which had run out of bread. Now there's an interesting first.