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COVER
STORY: OLYMPICS SPECIAL
Sydney
Waits ...
The
Olympics go Down Under after 44 years. D-day draws nearer and Australia
prepares to strut its stuff.
By
Rohit Brijnath in Sydney
First
things first, mate, if you're coming Down Under it would be a good beginning
if you knew where it is. Not like the lady who wrote in the other day
asking what the timings were for the "Vienna Boys Choir".
Then again mate, if you're heading Sydney-way, find yourself a book that
translates Australian, for here they're not quite comfortable with the
Queen's English. As in ... "I met up yesterday with Bluey (a redhead)
who was dressed in a bag of fruit (rhyming slang for suit). We grabbed
a brick (case of beer), walked down to the coat hanger (Harbour Bridge)
to see if we could spot a Noah's Ark (rhyming slang for shark)."
And finally, mate, just shake out your shoes each morning and watch where
you swim, for out here we got the world's most poisonous spiders, 87 types
of sharks and an ant called the bulldog that can kill people.
If you're shaking your head, don't stop, for their love of sport is as
unusual. The other day an anchor dropped his trousers, and underwear,
on "live" national television so that a doctor could pinpoint
on his buttocks where exactly a particular athlete had been injured.
Is the Sydney Olympics, the biggest logistical exercise on this continent
since World War II, going to be different? Must you ask? It's a shame
that it has taken 44 years (Melbourne 1956) for the Olympics to zig-zag
their way back here. For this is a land where they know that if there's
a sporting gene in the human DNA, then its bound to be green and gold
in colour.
In 776 B.C. when the ancient Olympics began in Olympia, Greece, the world
had yet to be introduced to the word "mate". Yet since the modern
Olympics began in 1896, it is significant that only two nations have been
present at every Games: Greece and Australia.
Then in Athens 1896, no women were allowed; today women run faster than
men do in some countries; then men received accord from kings, today it
is million-dollar cheques from sponsors. It is also why men use catheters
to insert another man's urine into their bladder so that they don't get
caught.
But one thing remains unaltered.
Ask first-timers like Ian Thorpe and Maurice Greene, or former winners
like Michael Johnson and Alexandre Popov, and they'll tell you that there
is but one definition of absolute greatness. Olympic gold.
It means nothing to win 40 races over four years, it means nothing for
Hicham el Guerroj to be told that he's pushed the frontiers of the mile
so far that if Roger Bannister ran against him today he would finish 110
m behind the Moroccan. To not win Olympic gold is to be incomplete.
It is why Guerroj has run 18 km every morning and 12 km every afternoon.
It is why in his room in Morocco, on the wall in front of him, is taped
a memory of him in Atlanta, when he, the favourite, tripped and came 12th.
It is a photograph of him weeping.
To walk amidst the congregating athletes in Homebush Bay, glistening and
perfectly tuned, is to marvel at their physical splendour. The entire
well being of countries corresponds to their medal count, as if a loss
can bruise the national ego. It is the reason nations invest heavily in
Olympic programmes, the Sydney athlete as much a product of his own genes
and environment as of his country's scientific capabilities. The fencer's
foil is made of an alloy used in jet fighters, wrestlers use a shoe with
one part that slides and another that sticks, swimmers wear a "fastskin"
designed according to their muscle contours, allowing them to appear as
naked as the ancient Olympians. Everything is finely calibrated in this
quest for perfection. Divers who plunge from 33 ft above the ground are
told of the force with which they hit the water, shooters lie on anthills
in practice to test their concentration.
Physically, men are hard to separate, every muscle similarly toned; it
means victory will be determined by boldness, by desire, by the certainty
that flows from an athlete's brain. And if you go to the athletes' village
in Sydney you can almost hear the accelerated heartbeat of the anxious
athlete. In Rome 1960, India's Leslie Claudius bought himself a pipe;
he didn't smoke, he just clenched it between his teeth to stop them from
rattling.
In response to nerves, some athletes will talk trash, stare, be dismissive
like Guerroj when he says, "When I'm on the track others don't mean
anything." Some are more subtle, the arrogance delivered, says Marion
Jones, "in just a certain walk in front of the blocks".
Teams are no better, seeking to demean, provoke, antagonise, anything
to find that elusive edge. The American swimming team unveiled a kangaroo-embossed
T-shirt with the words: "This' what we'll eat." The Australian
swimmers in response composed their own song:
"When
the Yankee doodle came to town
The Aussie locals stole their crown
The star and stripes will be no more
Cause the green and gold will conquer all
Red, white and blue, what you gonna do
When we come for you."
Now, with the 27th Olympic Games just a week away, the worst part is the
waiting. There is, you see, something incredibly cruel about sport, where
an athlete must wait for 208 weeks to be judged on a dive that takes three
seconds. It is a sacrifice that is best encapsulated in the plaintive
Nike ad plastered all over Sydney:
I will wear a dress
I will notice sunsets
I will sleep in on Sundays
In October
But first, September.
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