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In 1993 the Australian city of Sydney was named the host city for the Olympic Games of 2000, the first of the 21st century. It held off challenges from Beijing, China; Berlin, Germany; İstanbul, Turkey; and Manchester, England. As reported here in the Sydney Morning Herald of September 24, 1993, the choice of Sydney by the International Olympic Committee, headed by Juan Antonio Samaranch, was welcomed with city-wide celebrations.
At Circular Quay, just across the water from where unwanted white men and women fixed the city with unsavoury origins 205 years ago, the people rejoiced at being wanted by the world.
At 4.20 am, with the black harbour floating in air and the city sprinkled on the surface north and south, the International Olympic Committee on the other side of the Earth announced that Sydney would host the Olympic Games of 2000.
This city of such a grim past would splash itself across the future at the beginnings of the new millennium. For a few minutes on the morning of this September night fireworks splashed across the harbour, lighting up the dark edges of the city.
The people at the Quay, at Homebush where much of the sport will take place, and in other parts of Sydney, celebrated with boisterous, unashamed hedonism, with exuberance and blithe spirits.
Theirs had been the longest night. They had waited for Juan Antonio Samaranch’s statement with butterflies or bemusement.
Most would go to work after the party, some from offices where they slept briefly, others from house parties or pubs and clubs that stayed open most of the night.
They would join more phlegmatic Australians who are wary of noisy displays of nationalism and know that the Games cannot solve the nation’s problems. Too many in these tough times had already touched fool’s gold.
The full reckoning will come later, in the seven-year-long run-up to the Games and after, when Australians discover what the fame has done to their city.
Can the Games restore confidence to the nation? Only Los Angeles, where the Games were held in 1984, appears to have been overwhelmingly satisfied with its Olympics. Only Los Angeles has made a clear profit.
Yet the people, or their leaders, had made a choice to pursue this international festival of sport and commerce. They had chosen to bid for the biggest circus on the Earth, hoping the circus would bring its own bread.
They had run a hard race. They had won.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who revived the Olympic Games in 1894, said: “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part… the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.”
To Sydney’s celebrators this morning winning was the important thing. Yet it was impossible to deny them their happiness.
At the Quay, before the dawn, doubt was cast in the wake of the ferries and pleasure craft that slid by the Opera House, its sails neon-lit with Olympic colours.
Arthur Phillip, this town’s first governor, had written on arriving here in 1788: “Here all regret from former disappointments was at once obliterated; and Governor Phillip had the satisfaction to find one of the finest harbours in the world, in which a thousand sail on the line might ride in perfect security.”
Phillip had led one bright, gambling adventure here, hoping for great things and fearing the worst. What would he think of this reckless 1993 morning?
Surely the ghost of Bennelong, the Aboriginal after whom the point where the Opera House stands is named, was stirred today. The ghost of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury might have been moved, too. Lord Shaftesbury wrote in 1851: “Sydney is not a place to which members of our families could be safely sent.”
And the ghost of Anthony Trollope, the English writer who said of the harbour in 1873: “It is so inexpressibly lovely that it makes a man ask himself whether it would not be worth his while to move his household goods to the eastern coast of Australia, in order that he might look at it as long as he can look at anything.”
Early this morning most of the world wanted to look.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald [http://www.smh.com.au/]
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Sydney (Australia); Olympic Games
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