Ready, willing and quite able

By CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS, Los Angeles Times

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 4, 2000

Sydney hosts a citadel of shiny new athletic venues for the 2000 Olympics, and the cosmopolitan city is well-prepared to welcome the crowds.

SYDNEY, Australia -- Before the gunfire rang out, the harbor lay pretty as a picture on a Sunday afternoon, boat sails snapping in the wind, ferries chugging under the tall Harbor Bridge and looping around the great white Opera House. A few children lingered at the Double Bay wharf, scanning the watery horizon.

Then "bang, bang, bang!" The staccato sound carried far and fast across the water. I had just arrived in Australia a few hours earlier and had spent the drive from the airport hearing a grumpy cabbie complain about rising crime. Of course Sydney, a commercial powerhouse and home to 3.7-million of Australia's 18-million people, has its share of graffiti-marred blocks, racial anxieties and other big-city troubles. But the sound of gunfire I heard was not one of them. A girl, perhaps 10 years old, spoke up.

"Start of the rice," she said.

Or, in an American's language, start of the race. It was 2:30 sharp, and these bangs were starter-pistol shots for Sydney's weekly sailboat races. The children on the wharf had missed the observation boat and would have to watch from land -- by Sydney standards, a small catastrophe.

The shoreline had been clogged with bronzed and well-muscled men and women, squeezing into wetsuits, wrestling with rigging and scrambling over sleek 18-foot hulls, their faces war-painted with sunblock. Out on the water, they jostled for wind position and hollered about cozzies (swimsuits), eskies (coolers, often containing beer) and coldies (beer).

Maybe it did take a covert sprinkling of stray dollars to International Olympic Committee members' pockets to bring the 2000 Olympics here and not to Beijing, as investigations have found. But once the Summer Games begin on Sept. 15, I wonder how much anybody will complain about the site.

Since the Olympic deal was made back in 1993, a citadel of shiny new athletic venues has risen at Homebush Bay, 20 minutes west of downtown Sydney by train, 30 by "river cat" ferry. It is difficult to imagine a city better suited than Sydney for hosting the games: All those sports-minded Aussies, all those open spaces, and all that infrastructure for international conventioneers. (By some estimates, Sydney is the most popular international convention city in the world. And for four years running, it has been voted the best foreign city by Travel & Leisure magazine's readers.)

Furthermore, with Australia's tourism revenues still suffering from the Asian economic crisis of recent years, it's hard to imagine another world-class city as ready to entertain visitors.

Olympic organizers say the train service alone can deliver up to 50,000 visitors per hour to Homebush Bay. The 110,000-seat Stadium Australia, the venue for track and field events, was completed in March 1999. Most other facilities, including an aquatic center, boxing arena and regatta center, are typically open to visitors already.

[Photo: Jeff Miller] Participants in a bicycling tour of Sydney, Australia, take a break in front of the entrance to the city’s famed Luna Amusement Park.

During the Olympics, a measure of profiteering is inevitable. But on the whole, meals and lodgings in Sydney are not a bad deal.

In barely 200 years, the makers of Sydney have transformed it at least twice: first from a sun-drenched, wind-swept collection of wet rocks, ragged inlets, sandy beaches and aboriginal foraging territory into a great penitentiary, and then from penitentiary into one of the most cosmopolitan and widely admired cities.

Drawing immigrants from throughout Asia and Europe (after the reform of immigration restrictions that kept nonwhites away during the first half of this century), Sydney these days teems with diversity: An estimated one in three Sydneysiders is an immigrant or the child of an immigrant.

Australia's founding fathers were 160,000 British convicts ("government men" was the euphemism, although there were thousands of women, too), all of whom were shipped from England beginning in 1788.

The wharf at upscale Double Bay (Double Pay, some cost-conscious locals call it) is probably Sydney at its tamest: a passel of fancy boutiques and restaurants, neighbored by a Ritz-Carlton Hotel and a few other upscale lodgings.

(I stayed in the Sir Stamford Double Bay Hotel, but would not recommend it. Despite pleasantly eccentric decor in public rooms and agreeable service, my room needed new carpet, new paint and new furniture.)

The untamed end of the spectrum would probably be Kings Cross, the hell-raising, red-light district near central Sydney. The semi-tamed zone might include Glebe, which teems with yuppies, bohemians, blue-collar workers and signs of 19th-century immigrants from Ireland and 20th-century arrivals from Asia and elsewhere in Europe.

For more conventional tourist pizazz, there is Darling Harbor, a glitzy zone developed in the 1980s where conventions are held, a monorail runs and the National Maritime Museum, Sydney Aquarium, Powerhouse Museum and Central Railway Station stand.

Balmain is an old blue-collar suburb gone respectably bohemian; its main drag along Darling Street is a great place for an afternoon stroll.

Each morning during my four-day visit I set out to explore these territories by ferry, commuting from the little Double Bay wharf. I took a seat on the 8:29 to Circular Quay alongside the captains and lieutenants of Australian industry.

In general, a great way to get around Sydney is a SydneyPass, which for one price gives a visitor access to all ferries, trains, buses and airport transfers, as well as four different harbor cruises. A five-day pass costs about $68.

Of course my first stop was the Sydney Opera House. Tours run daily, begin every half hour, last about an hour and cost about $7 per adult -- and disclose a remarkable, soap-opera-like history.

Work on the opera house began in 1959, after a much-vaunted worldwide search for architects and designs. But what began as a national, identity-building, effort quickly deteriorated into a financial disaster, ultimately costing about $75-million, some 15 times the first estimates. Halfway through the 14-year construction period, the project was disavowed by its architect, Joern Utzon of Denmark.

Yet once the building was finally completed in 1973, an extraordinary thing happened: It fulfilled the promises made by politicians for the preceding two decades. Now you cannot find an Australian tourist brochure or guidebook without its image -- and you cannot in good conscience visit Sydney without at least circling the building up close.

The closer you get to the opera house complex, by the way, the more it belongs to the early '70s. The insides are full of orange and purple fabrics. The furniture in the upscale Bennelong restaurant seems a tad modular. And the bright exterior of the buildings turns out to be tile, like tiny scales on a family of large armadillos.

Once you spend a few days in town, you realize that the opera house is not really the dominant landmark in Sydney at all. The Harbor Bridge is.

It was completed in 1932 after nine years of work. Some locals call it "the coat hanger." Since October 1998, its highest catwalks and ladders, 400 feet above the harbor, have been accessible to almost anyone (age 12 and above) with sufficient nerve and money. BridgeClimb, a private company that leads the ascents, charges $70 to $85 per adult and requires customers to pass a sobriety test.

But it takes no money and not much nerve to follow the sidewalk out to the middle of the bridge span and marvel at the wind, the harbor below and the city before you.

Beneath the Harbor Bridge and next to the Circular Quay ferry hub lies the Rocks, the city's oldest neighborhood, full of graceful brick buildings, tourist shops, restaurants and an open-air crafts fair. Seeing it mentioned so often as the first stop for tourists, I was ready to scoff at the Rocks, but the buildings were irresistible, the restaurants include a few of the best in town, and on a sunny weekend, when Sydneysiders themselves wade into the tourist mob, it's hard to beat the atmosphere.

Outside of Dublin, I've never felt more welcomed by a city's residents.

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