It was simple really. The stadium went dark, some horses galloped into the yellow of the spotlight, the jaunty music struck up and from the moment of the first chord of the Olympic Opening Ceremony you knew that this time was going to be a good time. Thanks Sydney.
The Games themselves began the following day and to the delight of a positively amphibious nation they began with the greatest evening of competitive swimming ever seen. World records in every race, Ian Thorpe swimming sublimely, the delirious Aussies beating the Americans in an historic relay. For a while we all came from a land Down Under so infectious was the enthusiasm.
The success or otherwise of the swimming competition is one of the keys to the mood of the Games. After the sourness of Atlanta, this week in the pool revived the sport. It wasn't perfect; questions surrounded the Italians and the Dutch in particular, and when talking with swimming people about the sense of wellbeing suddenly suffusing the sport, one often felt that the wish was father to the feeling. Yet there were great moments. Thorpe we will have with us hopefully for several more Olympics. Gary Hall and Alexander Popov will be tough characters to replace, however, as will Suzie O'Neill who also bowed out this time. We will watch Pieter Van Den Hoogenband closely. Will his celebrity in swimming ever surpass Thorpe's? Does he deserve it to? Will the Italians continue to grow as quickly as the files on their drug cases? Meanwhile in Sydney we gawped at the Irish performances and then we laughed long (too long) and loud (too loud) at the Eric the Eel business. What humour the moment held had a harshness by the time we were done chuckling. We marvelled at the endurance of Steve Redgrave and, somehow, five Olympic golds later his gruffness became endearing and he became an icon of the Games. The Americans bossed as usual in most arenas but the best stories inevitably were elsewhere; Felix Savon's continued imperiousness in the heavyweight ring and his colleague Ivan Pedrosa's wondrous long jump; Svetlana Khorkina being robbed by mismeasurements in the gymnastics competition; Fu Mingxia, just a little girl when we knew her first in Barcelona, taking another diving gold; and those Lithuanian hoopsters and all those grunting wrestlers. If it's novelty you're after . . .
Overall the Irish effort had some graceful salvation in the form of Sonia O'Sullivan, who delivered by way of a personal resurrection one of the stories of the Games. Few athletes have suffered harder times in terms of confidence or crises than O'Sullivan and having watched her through the calamities of 1996 and 1997, few people would have predicted that she would add such a glittering postscript to her career. Her comeback, already adorned with double world cross country and double European championship wins, reached its high point on perhaps the greatest night of the Games. With the Homebush Bay stadium still buzzing from Cathy Freeman's 400-metre win, O'Sullivan's tussle in the 5,000-metre final with her old rival Gabriela Szabo made for better drama.
Indeed there was enough turmoil in O'Sullivan's head to keep most observers stuck to the edge of their seats. Beset by a sudden crisis of confidence half-way through, she appeared to lose touch with the field. Yet she talked her way back into the race, urging herself on with reminders of the work she had done and the targets she had set. Come the final lap, Szabo kicked marginally before O'Sullivan and that little advantage in decisiveness stayed with the Romanian until the finish line.
There was a moment of uncertainty as we drew breath and paused to see how O'Sullivan would react to silver. Her face creased into a smile as she absorbed the achievement, the time, the occasion and the celebration. For 10 years this country has been following her ups and downs. This would be a time of pure celebration.
Elsewhere it was chaos of course. The Irish performances were generally poor and the usual spate of rows and bun-fights erupted for public consumption. The people left to manage the Irish athletes on the ground in Sydney felt abandoned and betrayed, the Irish Olympic Committee went mano a mano with the Minister for Sport whose coat was held by the Irish Sports Council. The National Coaching Centre in Limerick removed Pat Hickey from a seat which he said he didn't occupy anyway. Athletes wept and everyone else despaired. The Punch and Judy show was packed away until Athens, when all the same diehards will be back in action.
In all these matters Pat Hickey, of course, makes a convenient and often willing lightning rod. His refusal to keep his head down, indeed his refusal to keep his head out of any photo containing an Irish medallist, does him no favours, while his evident enjoyment of the fray is also a little unbecoming in one so capable. He is by far and away our most influential international sports administrator and his rapid rise through the ranks of the International Olympic Committee suggests he is a resource which should more profitably be used than abused.
The willingness of a succession of Government sports ministers to get down in the dirt and wrestle with Hickey may prove a point but it does little for the advancement of Irish sport.
As yet we have still to evolve a big-picture view of the future of Irish sport. We still make it up as we go along. We'll have the BertieBowl but no coherent policy on sport in the community, we'll resent Croke Park getting lottery funds and pointedly refuse to examine the rootedness which makes the GAA such an integral part of so many places in Ireland, we'll send our kids abroad to be coached and trained, we'll cod ourselves about dope and cheating but we won't have a discussion about ethics in sport or contemplate making a significant stand on the issue.
We consider our own faults to be venialities, fibs of convenience and everyone else's to be dark mortalers, grand treacheries. Perhaps we're right. Certainly when we sin, we don't do so alone.
One of the common misapprehensions about the Michelle Smith Affair in Atlanta was that the entire controversy was American-driven. It wasn't, indeed most American journalists stuck up for Our Lady of the Chlorine and came to Sydney vowing that they wouldn't get burned again. They did of course.
American sport has some house cleaning to do. It was easy and valid to raise questions about some Italian and Greek performances at Sydney but this time America was the big drugs story and the unravelling isn't yet finished. Dr Wade Exum, former head of doping control to the US Olympic Committee, has still to conclude his case against his former employers, alleging that hundreds of positive dope tests dating back as far the Los Angeles Games of 1984 were suppressed.
The fate of 11,000 pages of USOC documents which suggest that at least 50 per cent of US positives went unpunished and unpublicised won't be decided until next month when settlement talks in the Exum case resume, but the behaviour of US officials in Sydney this summer and the almost gleeful chastisement of same by IOC members suggests a deep-rooted culture of secrecy and hypocrisy at the top of American sport. We still don't know the names of all the owners of all the positive urine samples submitted by Americans last summer.
We know one though. One of the spectacles of the Games was CJ Hunter. To be more precise one of the spectacles of the Games was CJ Hunter weeping. Man mountain looming over his vale of tears. After US Olympic authorities had clumsily attempted to throw a blanket over the issue, the story of CJ's big European adventure where he tested positive early and often last summer became one of the flashfires of the Games.
In retrospect perhaps as a story it had a little too much by way of distractions and as such transcended the very problem it grew from. There was so much celebrity attached - Johnny Cochrane, Nike emergency services, Mister Marion Jones forgawdsakes - that the seedy core of the business got mislaid somewhere. There was so much flimsy cack-handed denial and drippy-drip-drip of leaked facts that the impact got a little diluted.
Then there was the big show itself. CJ Hunter, a big nasty man who likes to act as his wife's personal bouncer, a big roughneck who makes a little habit out of abusing journalists, came to a big press conference and sobbed like a baby. That and not the cheating or the suppression became the story, that and whether it would (ssshhhhh!) affect Marion.
The world divided into those who felt that Marion Jones was, at the very least, smart enough to notice that her husband had turned into a walking keg of testosterone and those who felt that absolutely no inference should be drawn and, furthermore, that no questions should be asked of Jones lest her "drive for five" be impaired.
Jones counted herself emphatically among the latter grouping and in winning three of the five gold medals which she had so boldly coveted she acquitted herself well while not delivering the marketing jackpot which US track and field had hoped for. Images of her astonishing competence will linger almost as long as the stats she laid down. Jones is a hard, tough lupine woman who wears sheep's clothing when she deems it appropriate. Beaten in the long jump by Heike Drechsler and beaten in the relays by the ebullient Bahamas team, the press conference rooms were stuffed with those who brought their taperecorders along in the hope of capturing some flashes of petulance or bad grace. Jones' eyes told the story of her disappointment but she stuck her chin out and played the press conferences beautifully. Love her or loath her, she has class. The Games themselves? They needed the draught of innocence and enthusiasm which Sydney brought to them. Four years earlier the Olympic movement had retreated from the chaos of Atlanta like a battered army. They had been routed by cheats, hucksters, terrorists and the beguiling nature of Atlanta's over-ambition. In Sydney by the time we clasped arms and sang Waltzing Matilda and watched the fireworks pour once again from the Harbour Bridge, it was possible to at least discern the ideals of the Olympic movement once more. Aggressive commercialism and heavy-handed security had been pushed back, and an open-faced friendliness put in place. Maybe it's corny but there was an air of international celebration about the place, a feeling of unity and happy focus which is what the Olympic movement contrives to create.
The irony, of course, was that it wasn't the heavy hand of Official Olympism which created the success of Sydney. It was the sheer lightness of touch of the host nation. By replacing all the hokum of white doves and inspiring anthems with some humour and enthusiasm, Australia helped the Games get their groove back. Athens, which has the potential to be bad tempered and badly organised, should learn the lesson. By then Juan Antonio Samaranch, the father of the modern Olympic movement, will be gone. The sheer strangeness of the man often obscures the changes he has wrought in the Olympic movement. It was a whispering point of the Sydney Games that Samaranch could leave his dying wife and come to the celebration and then fly home to bury her before returning to Sydney in time to pronounce the Games "the best ever."
He was right, they were the best ever, and even though Samaranch himself so wanted us all to be in Beijing last summer that he gaily rode across Tiananmen Square on a bicycle as a ghoulish publicity stunt, he can take some of the credit. He has steered the Games away from the disaster of extinction, he has flirted with, nay embraced greed and giganticism, but somehow, in the right setting at the right time, he presented us with an Olympics which was happy and worthwhile. The Games could still be smaller and more manageable and better-run, but if the lessons of Sydney are learned, history will be kinder to Samaranch and the Games might stand a chance of seeing out another 100 years or so.
