Sydney celebrated the 10th anniversary of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games last week with grand festivities and re-enactments. Sydney, although not the capital of Australia, is the nation’s largest city and the second to hold the Olympic Games – the first was Melbourne in 1956. The Sydney Olympic Games is still regarded by many as the best ever. Sebastian Coe, an Olympic 1500 meter athletics gold medallist, campaigning for the London Olympics in 2012, announced yesterday that “never was a city so vibrant, excited and frankly embracing of an Olympic Games … venues never so full … sport never so inspiring.”
Sydney Olympic Park still attracts 9 million visitors each year and the main stadium is used for domestic and international rugby and soccer matches. The aquatics centre attracts a million competitors a year for swimming and basketball events, as well as other indoor entertainment. Part of Sydney Olympic Park was dedicated to Cathy Freeman during the celebrations on Wednesday for her gold medal win. Her 400-metre run has been described by Sebastian Coe as “the best session of athletics” he can remember.
Also, yesterday, in the United States, the U.S. gymnastics team received Olympic bronze medals awarded to them for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, ten years after the event. The International Olympic Committee and the International Gymnastics Federation made the decision when, in 2008, a Chinese competitor was exposed as ineligible because she was under-age at the time of the Sydney Olympics. Competitors were required to be 16 and Dong Fangxiao was only 14, therefore disqualifying her team. In Hartford, the U.S. each of the six individual team members was awarded their bronze medals.
Ten years ago, I had to get permission from the doctor to watch the Olympics because I had torn ligaments in my lower back and was not allowed to sit down (or stand) for long periods of time. Fortunately, I had medical clearance for the Olympics and I was particularly careful to rotate my sitting, standing and lying positions. The injury was caused by a fall during a morning jog, so I felt like an athlete who missed the chance of a lifetime to attend the Olympic Games in their home country! Because of my injury, I think I watched every single event!
For me, the Australian highlights of the Sydney Olympic Games were:
1. Men’s 4 x 100m freestyle swimming relay (the United States had never lost the event in the Olympics)
2. Team three day equestrian event (the team’s third successive gold medal)
3. Men’s trap shooting (Michael Diamond’s second successive gold medal)
4. Women’s 400m track event (Cathy Freeman, a Birri Gubba woman, won the first individual indigenous gold medal and Australia’s 100th Olympic medal)
5. Women’s beach volleyball (a surprise gold medal win)
6. Women’s under 49kgs taekwondo (Lauren Burns won Australia’s first gold medal in taekwondo)
7. Men’s long jump (Jai Taurima’s remarkable effort to win a silver medal).
My highlights involving non-Australians were:
1. Japanese Naoko Takahashi’s women’s marathon victory (the fastest Olympic women’s marathon in history)
2. American Angelo Taylor’s men’s 400m hurdles win
3. German Nils Schumann’s men’s 800m track event (beating the world favourite Wilson Kipketer of Denmark)
4. American Marion Jones’s women’s 200m track win (unfortunately she was later stripped of this medal due to taking a banned substance)
5. Greek Konstantinos Kenteris’s men’s 200m track win (Greece’s first gold medal in a running event)
6. Kenyan Noah Ngeny men’s 1,500m track victory (in one of the biggest surprises at the Sydney Olympics beating Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj)
7. Cuban women’s volleyball team’s third successive gold medal.
Other highlights at the games were Great Britain’s Steve Redgrave’s fifth rowing medal, Czech Republic’s Jan Zelezny’s third successive gold medal in the javelin, Haile Gebrselassie from Ethiopia winning the 10,000m track event again and Germany’s Heike Drechsler’s long jump win after an eight-year long gold drought. And the Netherlands swimming double of Pieter van den Hoogenband and Inge de Bruijn. And what about Equatorial Guinea’s Eric Moussambani in his sole heat swim of the 100m freestyle and…
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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