Wow! Only four hundred and something days to go, and none of us can wait – or can we. I get the distinct impression that Australians are starting to suffer from Olympics overkill and the real countdown is on. We are counting the days until the Olympics are over. Still, if you are planning to go don’t worry, I’m sure there’ll be more than enough tickets for everybody, it’s just a matter of what lengths you are willing to go to. Decent tickets to decent events at a decent price will be harder to get than tickets for Star Wars Episode 1, though part of me doubts we’ll see people camping out for four months to get their hands on them. First let me clarify because I do have an opinion on this, by decent I do not mean $8 for front row seats at the synchronised swimming, but if that appeals to you then that’s okay, I’m sure there’ll be lots of lucky Westpac customers to keep you company.

It does seem, however, that interest in the games is waning, personally the most interesting thing I’ve seen concerning the Olympics lately is that echidna on Seven Nightly News that can shoot arrows into the bullseye night after night. Now that is talent.

Is there a possibility that there has been some misunderstanding? Could there be a place in Austria called Siddy where people are experiencing the same sorts of emotions that we are? Or maybe S.O.C.O.G.’s P.R. department isn’t doing its job. I think I could honestly say that if I didn’t watch television, read the paper, listen to the radio or use the Internet and I lived in the middle of Australia, in a shanty made from bark and hessian sacks and I’d never spoken to another human in my life, then I would now nothing of this ‘event of the millennium’.

All we have to do is make it more interesting so people want to find out about it. And, you may well ask, how do we go about making a spectacle like the Olympics more interesting? Well I do have a couple of ideas. I believe that in the fast paced world we live in, the games just take too long.

Here’s what I propose.

Firstly, we could do away with the unnecessary events. Take heats for example, surely it would be more interesting if we just got all the swimmers and put them in the pool at once and let ‘em do their thing – I for one would love to see Ray Warren commentating the 400 metres individual medley with 357 swimmers in the pool. And I refuse to believe that the men’s 100-metre sprint would be less exciting with 80 runners as opposed to the accepted eight. Can you imagine how much fun Darrell Eastlake would have trying to call the weightlifting with the arena floor resembling the university’s gym at peak time? Now that would be HUGE. Or how about watching the gymnasts fight it out over whose turn it is on the balance beam – Classic Stuff.

Alternatively we could think about combining events, such as all the fighting sports – are they really necessary? We could combine boxing, wrestling, fencing and taekwondo to resemble something like Mortal Kombat. How about a combination of Long Jump and the Ten Metre platform dive where the aim is to get as much distance whilst creating as little splash as possible. Who could argue the merit of basketball crossed with trampolining or soccer played with a shuttlecock? And I know that you’ll all agree with me on this one: Synchronised swimming crossed with… (heh, heh) target shooting (should put a bit of excitement into the arena). I mean who’s not going to pay money to see gymnasts in the 100m backflip relay or the world’s best hurdlers take on the equestrian jumping course.

If we put all this together and have I.O.C. members handing out gifts at the gates (we’ll call it giving back to society) we can’t lose.

The games of Siddy 2000 could be the most revolutionary in history and I’m prepared to guarantee that if all my suggestions were followed, these games would be the most memorable as well. Bruce McAvaney would have himself the time of his life.

And why should the fun start and stop at the events? We can organise sing-a-longs on the trains, as anybody who’s ever travelled to Sydney knows we need something to keep us occupied during the inevitable twenty-minute delay. Personally, I think a good positive travel motto is needed, something like "travel with Cityrail and get there only half an hour late".

Merchandising is another problem because there is so much room for advertising here and frankly printing the Sydney 2000 logo on the bottom of socks just doesn’t strike me as viable. We need to sell the rights to Nintendo so we can reach the younger demographic, maybe with Mario’s Olympics or something. We can have a special code that you put in which gives the American basketball team big heads – then again…

We need saturation, but in a different way to what we’re getting now. I’m talking a special night on Sale of the Century where the answer to every question is Sydney 2000, I’m talking theme songs with Daniel Johns from silverchair screaming "we’ll make it up to you in Sydney 2000". The potential is enormous.

See what all these ideas can create, it could all be so exciting… and it’s only 400 and something days away!

By Clinton Hoy, June 1999