Keep the Flame Alive Sydney 2000: Bid and Opening Ceremony graphic with picture of the Sydney Olympic Stadium with fireworks overhead superimposed on Sydney Harbor, where the Sydney Opera House is visible.

Sydney 2000: Its Can-Do Olympic Bid and Iconic Opening Ceremonies

Release Date: January 16, 2025

Category: Sydney 2000 | History | Olympic Bids | Podcast

Welcome to our look back at the Sydney 2000 Olympics and Paralympics! We asked which historical Games should get a deep dive, and your response was to take another look at arguably one of the best Olympics of all time (it even got that coveted designation from International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch at the Closing Ceremony).

Sydney’s bid to host the Games

We start with how the Olympics got to Sydney in the first place. Unlike today’s process for host city selection, Sydney had to go up against a host of cities in a “beauty pageant” style bid process. Cities often spent a year or two putting together multiple bid books detailing how it would stage the Games—a process that cost millions of dollars—and they would also lobby IOC members to win their votes.

Seven years ahead of the planned Olympics, IOC members would watch final presentations from all of the candidates, then vote for who would be the next Olympic city. One city won, and the rest were devastated.

For the 2000 Olympics, Sydney was up against four other cities: Beijing, Berlin, Manchester (UK), Istanbul. One by one, they fell by the wayside—even Beijing, which was the front-runner for most of the race.

In this episode, Jill looks at the five cities’ bids and why Sydney won out (and unfortunately, there’s a hint of scandal). Among the reasons Sydney’s bid stood out, this classic early 90s theme song may have been the inspiration cherry on the top of the sundae:

The Sydney 2000 Olympics Opening Ceremonies

Once Sydney won the right to host, it had to put on a big welcome to the world, and in the second half of the episode, Alison looks back at the Opening Ceremonies for both the Olympics and the Paralympics.

The Olympic Opening Ceremonies used one of the classic Olympic Opening Ceremony storylines: Child as main character wanders through the country’s history. Thirteen-year-old Nikki Webster won the honors for the Sydney 2000 ceremony, and she proceeded to take the audience on a trip through the long and diverse landscape of Australia. This includes an ocean view, a performance celebrating Australia’s Aborignial heritage, the Colonialism era, and more.

Of course, the night wouldn’t be complete without the introduction of the Sydney 2000 Olympic theme song:


While the song wasn’t so memorable, the cauldron lighting was. Sydney was coming off the heels of Atlanta 1996, where Muhammad Ali lit the cauldron (never fails to make Jill cry), a complete secret. And before that was Barcelona 1992, where an archer stood on the stadium floor and shot an arrow up to the cauldron perched on the top edge of the stadium (best cauldron lighting EVER).

What would Sydney do? They pulled out all the stops. The final torchbearers were all Australian female Olympic heroes. Cathy Freeman, the current 400m world champion and favorite to win gold at these Games, got the call to light the cauldron. She carried the torch up a staircase to a pool of water and lit a ring of fire in the water. The ring started to rise up around her to journey to the top of the stadium—and then disaster, as the cauldron malfunctioned. Would Sydney’s cauldron lighting make them a laughingstock?

Videos today generally edit out the awkward minutes, but luckily, engineers found a fix, and the majestic cauldron lighting continued:

The Sydney 2000 Paralympics Opening Ceremonies

Not to be outdone, the Paralympics Opening Ceremony was a festival of balloons and Kylie Minogue singing the classics “Waltzing Matilda” and “Celebration.” The organizers also had a less problematic, but equally stunning cauldron lighting (see about 2:30.00 in the video).

We’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversary of Sydney 2000 all throughout 2025 with monthly episodes that look back at some of the highlights and bring back perhaps-forgotten stories. Look for them here or on your favorite podcast app on the second Thursday of the month!

Sources

The Sydney 2000 Bid

The Opening Ceremonies

 

 

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This is an uncorrected machine-generated transcript and may contain errors. Please check its accuracy against the audio. Do not quote from the transcript; use the audio as the record of note.

1-Sydney 2000: The Bid and Opening Ceremonies

Jill Jaracz: Hello and welcome to our first history moment of 2025 here on Keep the Flame Alive, the podcast for fans of the Olympics and Paralympics. If you love the games, we are the show for you.

This on our special history moment show, which comes out once a month, we share stories from one specific games all year long to remember the legacy of games we have loved or maybe not loved in the past, but this is a games we loved. We’re doing Sydney 2000 this year. Very exciting. I’m your host, Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co host, Alison Brown.

Alison, hello. Good. How are you?

G’day. G’day, mate.

Alison Brown: I promise that will be the last time I say that all year.

I don’t

Jill Jaracz: promise because I don’t know what comes out of my mouth most days.

Alison Brown: Well, this is fun because last year we did Chamonix, obviously none of us remember Chamonix. This a lot, we certainly remember Sydney.

A lot of our listeners remember Sydney. But what I think is funny is the listeners that Don’t remember Sydney and this is all going to be brand new to them.

Jill Jaracz: If it is brand new to you, listeners, I want to know, please drop us a line. It’s no shame, but we want to know, as you listen to these stories, what you think.

Really, because I, I’m very curious to know what, what people remember versus what we’re researching, and maybe, you know. Forgot or didn’t know in the first place or, reliving the stories that we’ve loved too. Cause man, these were games. These are really good games.

Alison Brown: These were so good. And I’m having so much fun rewatching things.

And you know, you think 25 years ago, that’s, you know, more than half my or less than half my life ago. And yet how much has changed and how much has stayed the same and, and stories that keep coming back up and how certain things about the Olympics and Paralympics never change.

Jill Jaracz: Right, right, And we have, we’re talking about the bid today. So we have classic competition bid again, and just the craziness around all of it and how, how much hype, how much everything. And it’s just, I’ve been putting it into my veins for the last several days.

Alison Brown: Long with shrimp on the bobby.

Jill Jaracz: Right, and bad hairdos.

Alison Brown: I think we’ll all be cutting a mullet by the end of this year.

Jill Jaracz: Right, right, right. before we get to going, we do want to say, L. A., we’re thinking about you. L. A. is having a horrible time right now with fires in the area. I do know that, uh, listener Pam, who is one of the Olympian members, she’s doing okay.

Okay. Right now, everything is safe, but I believe another Olympian member lost everything. uh, Shukla Stani David Davis also doing okay,

Alison Brown: and we do know there’s been a lot of speculation in the news about 2028 and LA. We know nothing. Nothing is fact. Nothing is, is in stone. So we’re not going to sit here and start speculating on what may or may not happen with what happens in 28.

Let’s just keep people alive right now.

Jill Jaracz: Yes. It’s just devastating to see all the damage. . So sad to see people’s lives just totally destroyed and everything they own gone. It’s amazing to see the city be so resilient and everybody come together. in amazing ways to help, but it’s, it’s going to be a long haul.

When you look at just the massive amount of neighborhoods that have been decimated by fire, how long that will take to rebuild is going to be tough, but I think they’ll, they’ll do it. They’ll do it because everyone’s been coming together so far.

Alison Brown: And I know a lot of people saw the Gary Hall Jr. story.

We’re going to talk about Gary Hall when we get to swimming, but I do want to mention this was so nice little bit of hope where Gary Hall Jr., a swimmer, has medals obviously from Sydney and, Atlanta and Athens. And the IOC, he lost it all in the fire, lost everything. And the IOC is going to replace all those medals with, with replicas from those different Olympics.

And it was just this nice little gesture that made me feel like you’re going to be okay. Like LA, you’re going to be okay. The world is pulling for you here.

Jill Jaracz: Yes. Yes.

Sydney’s bid for the 2000 Olympics and Paralympics

Alison Brown: So did you bring me a steak and a gold watch to talk about the bid process?

Jill Jaracz: Well, we will find out, won’t we?

So I’m talking about the bid and, we are going to go back to, uh, 1993, September 23rd, 1993. It’s Monte Carlo. In Monaco, five bidding cities go in front of the IOC, making their pitch for the right to host the 2000 Games. Beijing, Berlin, Istanbul, Manchester, UK, and Sydney, Australia. The field was originally eight cities, but Brasilia, Milan and Tashkent, Uzbekistan have all dropped out before the final leg.

Beijing is seen as the late frontrunner, a city hoping to open themselves up to the world just four years after the government had silenced protesters at Tiananmen Square. Uh, but Sydney stands in its way.

Australia had hosted the summer Olympics in 1956 and it wanted them back. The 2000 Olympics was Sydney’s first time bidding for a games, but that bid was a long time coming.

Sydneyites or maybe Sydney Ciders, I heard that was out of date, but I saw them say Sydney Ciders back in, back in the day. Uh, they started thinking about an Olympic bid back in 1970. and the city’s deputy Lord Mayor even formed a citizens committee to look into bidding for the 1988 games, but then the economic disaster that was Montreal 1976 dissuaded them, and those games ended up going to Seoul, which we talked about earlier. of a couple years ago.

Meanwhile, Australia, the country did start bidding for the games, but both Brisbane and Melbourne beat out Sydney for the right to be a prospective bid city. Sydney did get the call for 2000 and the city was ready with a plan. Their bid started in earnest in late 1990 when Minister for Transport Bruce Baird and Premier Nick Griner formed a special committee to bid.

Griner flew to Europe to gauge the interest of the IOC delegates. Then wrote to the Australian Olympic Committee to get their blessing. AOC President John Coates,

Yay!

who is also from Sydney, said, Sydney’s going to have to build an aquatic center, and they’re going to have to build a stadium. Done and done.

Baird also traveled around the country to get buy in from the federal government, the opposition, and Indigenous leaders. He also met with executives to make sure the media did not kill the bid.

In May 1992, less than a year and a half before the IOC’s decision, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating committed five million Australian dollars to the bid process.

It’s a lot of money. And when you think about, Project 2020 plus five or whatever project it was that TBAC wanted to streamline how much people paid on the bid. That’s 5 million for the bid process. The finance minister, however, was not thrilled about the economics and spending going on. Luckily the bid committee had John Coates in their corner.

John Coates was not yet a member of the IOC. That would come in 2001, much like, Oh, uh, Newsflash, Tony Astonguay is going to be a member of the IOC. So you see this a lot. However, John Coates was the president of the Australian Olympic Committee and a council member of the World Rowing Federation at the time.

The Sydney Morning Herald quotes Baird as saying, He was simply brilliant. Some people see him as a Machiavellian figure, but he was thoroughly strategic in what we needed to achieve. He was brilliant. But even though Sydney had John Coates on its side, it would be a battle to win the right to host.

Crowded Fields. We’ve got Istanbul making its first of five unsuccessful bids building on the concept that Turkey represented the unification of continents, just like the Olympic rings are connected. It hopes that by hosting the games, it could solve some infrastructure problems in the city, get people involved with sport and restore the city’s place in the global landscape.

Berlin’s bid with the motto Thanks to the world, came on the heels of reunification. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, and the city wanted to showcase how East and West had reunited and were returning to the global stage as one city. IOC member Dr. Vili Dauma Who’s name you might recognize because he led the Munich 1972 organizing committee was on the board of trustees for this bid.

Who also appears in the bid book writing a message of support? One Dr. Thomas Bach, who was an IOC member at the time.

Alison Brown: The characters that we are going to get circling around is going to be so much fun.

Jill Jaracz: That, that

is one of the best parts of this. When you see people who are like, way earlier in their careers and they just keep popping up time and time again.

The Berlin Bid was seen as an early contender, but the organizing committee experienced some scandals. Journalists uncover the fact that the committee had created dossiers on the IOC members and their personal preferences. The New York Times included a note that the committee figured that Only seven of the 94 IOC members are quote, Not for sale.

7 of 94. Not for sale.

Alison Brown: I’m for sale if anybody wants to buy me.

How

Jill Jaracz: do you like your steak?

Alison Brown: I’m more of a vegetarian.

Jill Jaracz: Other problems with the Berlin bid included thousands of protesters as well as economic issues stemming from reunification. The federal government lost interest. Chancellor Helmut Kohl didn’t even lobby for the bid.

And the 1993 federal budget did not include money for the bid. Although Berlin said they could do it on private funds. We all know how much the IOC likes government support. So they’re not looking good at this point.

Manchester, bidding for the games a second consecutive time. You will love this. The reason why Manchester started bidding for the games, spite.

Alison Brown: Oh. You know I love a good spiteful Brett.

Jill Jaracz: So bid director Robert Scott started his quest to get the games in 1985 after hearing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher promote London as an Olympic bid city. And she apparently slighted Manchester in such a way that Scott was mad and took action and formed a bid committee.

Alison Brown: Okay, we get a spiteful Brit going after Margaret Thatcher. Was this man made for me?

Jill Jaracz: So they had bid for 1996. They finished fifth out of six cities. They thought they could pull it out in 2000 because they had been wooing the IOC longer than any of the other candidates. So we got that. Manchester’s bid broke, promised a classic Olympic win. games, compact venue plan, they touted the country sporting tradition and government commitment.

The, the prime minister then was John Major and he was a big supporter of the bid, ready to put money behind it. However, behind the scenes, government officials weren’t so confident. And in 2019, the UK National Archives released files on a bid failure inquiry that showed a different side of the bid. including, a quote from one Damien Green, who at the time worked in the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit, though you might recognize his name from when he served in Prime Minister Theresa May’s second cabinet.

He said, among other things, quote, no one in their right mind would spend three weeks in Manchester rather than Sydney. It is hard to imagine Manchester ever being successful, end quote.

Alison Brown: Well, I think what’s interesting is that the points made in that Manchester bid, the, the small, the, the small footprint and all those things, and traditionalism is what made London 2012 so good.

Jill Jaracz: Right.

Alison Brown: So they kept that idea, just now you can go to London and not Manchester.

Jill Jaracz: Beijing, their bid played on the concept of building a national identity and opening the country up to the world. They would also develop the Olympic movement in China and Asia. With China having the world’s largest population at the time, the lure of giving sponsors access to those consumers was strong.

The city also had a number of venues in place thanks to hosting the 1990 Asian Games and China was ready to spare no expense when it came to building infrastructure. Another hope from outside the country was that the gains would not just spur China’s economic growth, but almost help it, also help it become a more democratic nation.

A theme we heard about Sochi.

Alison Brown: But also what we heard 2000, I mean, this is their 2008 bid. Did they just rewrite the book?

Jill Jaracz: Maybe. If we do Beijing 2008, we’ll find out. Right. one thorn in Beijing’s side. U. S. Congress. They opposed China’s bid due to its human rights record and wrote to the IOC to express its thoughts.

China was not thrilled. The Deputy Mayor of Beijing and Bid Committee Chair Zhang Baifa went so far as to threaten a boycott of Atlanta 1996 as revenge. But Chinese officials disavowed that statement pretty quickly and said, Oh, the threat never existed.

Alison Brown: No, he did not say that. You imagined it

Jill Jaracz: still.

We know the IOC doesn’t really care about human rights issues because as I said before, if they worried about them, no place could host the games.

Sidney was one of the rare 2000 bids with a theme. That theme was Share the Spirit. And yes, it has its own song.

Alison Brown: I like to imagine John coat singing back up on that

Jill Jaracz: we’ll have the entire song in the show notes if you want to live and share that spirit with us. But

I, I feel the spirit that

Alison Brown: you have shared.

Jill Jaracz: I couldn’t figure out cause I saw like promos of it. I think they use this like throughout the whole thing. They really got their money’s worth with the song. But I was like, I saw it as a promo and then. I saw the bid book that had the song lyrics in it, and I was like, Ooh, this has to be the same thing.

And I think they just kept using it. So they wanted to share the spirit. They wanted their games to be the athletes games and their bid promised a lot. New Olympic stadium, other new venues for starters, Sydney offered to pay for the freight costs for host horse and boating equipment, transportation. They also offered to pay for, and this, this may be one of the reasons their bid went over the top, flying athletes and officials to Sydney.

This move cost them about 40 million Australian dollars, but for small NOCs that couldn’t afford it, that this was a big, big deal. They also made a strong commitment to host an environmentally sound games, something that appealed to Scandinavian IOC members. One other promise that we’ll touch on later in the year, they promised to aim for a drug free games.

Okay.

So the team, the, so the bid team’s final push included Prime Minister Paul Keating and his wife, Anita, tennis, great Yvonne Gouligon.

Singer Dame Jones. I know . Pulling out all the stops here. Singer Dame Jones Sutherland, new South Wales government leaders and 11-year-old Tanya Blendco, A school girl. Go. A school girl from banger who served as the clincher for the final presentation. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a Anita Ke Keating spoke five languages fluently, which helped earned European votes. However, Tanya stole the show, saying that Sydney was, quote, a friendly city where it doesn’t matter where you come from. We’re all Australians together. We eat together, learn together, and play together. That’s what the Olympics really means to me.

Please, sir, could I

Alison Brown: have some

Jill Jaracz: Olympics?

So the winner need a majority of votes, which meant four rounds of voting, the loser gets dropped out every round. Istanbul went first, getting just seven votes. Berlin followed, unable to get more than nine votes.

Sorry, Teebok.

Manchester was next. They had 11 votes in the first round, 13 in the second, but went back down to 11 in the third as votes went to the two forerunners.

By this point. Beijing was also looking like it would be the clear winner. It had led every round of voting so far. First round, it was Beijing 32, Sydney 30. In the second round, Beijing jumped to a 37 32 lead. In the third round, it was 40 37, Beijing, but they still hadn’t been able to get the majority. for the Sydney bid leaders, the wait was excruciating.

They wanted a sign, and they got one. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Helen Pitt noted that the Sydney bid had become closed with the Venezuelan IOC member Flor Isava Fonseca, and they arranged for her to give them a secret sign. Isava Fonseca would wear a green scarf from left to right across her shoulder if Sydney survived to the last round.

She did. And one of the Sydney lobbyists saw it ahead of IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch’s announcement. Before he read the winning name, he thanked all the candidate cities. When people in Beijing who were watching the live broadcast, when they heard their city’s name, they went just got so excited. They thought they won. They started celebrating. They started celebrating too soon. Samarans reached into his hukou pocket, pulled out an envelope, opened it and said, And the winner is Sydney, Australia, by a two vote margin. Sydney surprised everyone, beating Beijing 45 43.

This victory gave them the rights to host the Olympics and also the Paralympics.

Sydney’s bid came down to the strength of its technical aspects, including Australia’s sporting tradition, the country’s past hosting of the games, its commitment to the environment, and modern sports facilities. As Italian IOC member Primo Nebbiolo told the New York Times, quote, The members preferred Sydney because it was a candidate which presented no problems.

It was easier for them to make this decision than to face the prospects of dealing with a big country like China, its population, its problems, end quote. but wait, the story does not end there.

We’re in prime scandal time and there was one with the Sydney bin as well in January 1999 a few months before the games in the middle of the Salt Lake City bribery scandal John Coates admitted to offering 35, 000 each to two African IOC members the night before Sydney won the contest, which, remember, they won by two votes.

Did John Coates go rogue?

I don’t know if he went rogue, but he’s like, No, no, no, no, no. This was not an out and out bribe. The money was to go to the National Olympic Committees. Not the IOC members. That would be a bribe. But this is going to the Olympic Committees to, uh, help build up, uh, Sports in their respective countries, those being Kenya and Uganda, and coach told the Sydney Morning Herald, quote, I thought it was necessary for us to show our commitment to those NOCs with a view to winning those votes.

My view was it might encourage them to consider their votes for Sydney. While Australian IOC executive board member Kevin Gosper defended these tactics and said Sydney won on merit. Other bid cities were not pleased, especially Manchester. If you shock, Manchester’s angry. Grant Stringer of the Manchester Olympics Committee demanded that the IOC strip Sydney of the games and refund the money to spent on bids to prospective host cities.

So there you have it. A little tarnish on that bid. Would Sydney be able to polish that off and produce a scandal free games? We will find out over the coming months, starting with your first story,

Alison Brown: Alison.

Sydney 2000 Olympics Opening Ceremonies

Alison Brown: So I talk about the opening ceremony, and they may not have polished off the standal. I think they burned it off.

And I will explain. So on Friday, September 15th, 2000, 110, 000 spectators in the stadium. 3. 7 billion television viewers in 220 countries around the world watched 12, 600 performers in a show created by artistic director David Atkins that cost A reported one million Australian dollars. So the ceremony opened with a cavalcade of horses and riders and the Australian anthem.

But the show really got going when 13 year old Nikki Webster skipped into Stadium, Australia. Get ready for a trip through the long history and diverse landscape. of this beautiful country down under. Almost immediately as Nikki appears on the floor of the stadium, she is scooped up into a harness and flown way up into the air, and the floor of the stadium is filled with giant jellyfish and monster sized fish puppets.

She is swimming through the Australian ocean. So, After she is done with her little swim, she lands in the middle of hundreds of Aboriginal performers and the Aborigine uh, performance wise played a huge role in this, opening ceremony. And it was a big deal in Australian culture to get the Aboriginal history recognized at this time.

We’re going to see that in our story, as we go along. The Aboriginal performers were singing and walking on stilts and producing a lot of smoke. And you know what goes with smoke? Fire. Fire. Fire eaters and dancers swinging lit batons joined in the fun. And as the smoke clear, we move on to the next segment, which is the gardens of Australia.

Performers dressed as giant flowers glided onto the floor. This was Vegas style costumes where, you know, the girl is five, five and a half feet tall, and the costume is 10 feet tall. Glitter, sparkles, giant satin petals. We’ve got butterflies, golden leaves, and more flowers joining the fun. On the floor, they perform a beautiful dance in a kaleidoscope pattern.

This is a program made for the stadium because in person, this must have just been Overwhelmingly beautiful. It’s nice on camera when you watch the video, but you know, in person, this was way, way more impressive. You may be wondering what happened to Nikki. Did she get swallowed by one of the giant fish?

Oh no, don’t worry. She is back in her harness, flying high above the gardens. The Aboriginal performers come in and fill the floor among the flowers. It is an old school stadium spectacle. Now we get into the history of the country, but because who’s coming on, but the British colonists who are riding in the sort of clockwork sailboat bicycles.

So it’s bicycle powered, but it looks like a sailboat. Okay. They tap dance, they crack whips, they axe fake trees, and we get to the good Australian hoedown.

There was so much tap dancing in this program. I was thrilled. I put on my chap shoes and joined them. I can do a little time step. I’m right here. So then the dancers, do you know how they like to. Move items around and kind of use it for multiple things. So the ships get taken apart. You’ve got some corrugated cardboard and metal and now they start building a town.

Jill Jaracz: Oh, right, including

Alison Brown: a giant clockwork windmill. And now we’re sort of out in the outback of Australia. We’ve got cattle dogs that come on the scene, which of you know is my favorite part. Real cattle dogs just running across the stadium. There’s bleeding of sheep, but there are no sheep, so I think that’s just piped in.

You have a whole bunch of shipping containers on the floor, as if things are being shipped into the outback. Guess what emerges from our shipping containers? You’ll never guess. Suburban dads dressed in Hawaiian shirts with pretend lawnmowers. Because now we’re in the suburbs of Austria. I

Jill Jaracz: remember mention of the, I think in research more so than actual memory, the, the lawnmower brigade and how funny it was.

Alison Brown: And they do a little dance number with their little pretend lawnmowers. I did not understand what was happening. I didn’t care because here’s Nikki Webster. She’s back feeding an apple. To an imaginary horse, because she’s out in the field. I don’t know. There she is. We’re good. Now comes the parade of colorful floats with outrageously dressed dancers.

It’s like Carnival, and it’s the colors of the Olympic rings. There’s a float for each color. I think it was supposed to represent, represent the various communities and immigrant communities in Australia and around the South Pacific and Oceania. I don’t know. There was feathers. There was a lot of singing.

I have no idea what was going on. There were dancers in full body paint glitter.

Jill Jaracz: Wow. Wow. And the hard thing is, when we watch these online, they don’t necessarily have commentary at all.

Alison Brown: There’s no commentary. But you gotta see a good, uh, Polynesian Australia covered in blue body glitter. Ooh, don’t miss it.

And here’s Nikki to sing the inspirational song Under the Southern Skies. I do not have a clip because I don’t think we can actually play the song. Cause this was a pop song that was on the radio. I’m sure it’s under copyright, but I will tell you,

I will read to you part of the lyrics. This is the refrain. Under the southern skies, together in this land, every voice in celebration, a family hand in hand. Under the southern skies, As one, we rise and turn our eyes to see all the wonder of the future in a world of harmony. More tap dancing, more people writing on what looked like giant Roombas, more tap dancing, kind of morphing into early day hip hop, more tap dancing, all culminating with Nikki walking on the field hand in hand with one of the original aboriginal performers.

Catch your breath, but only for a moment because here comes the Sydney 2000 Marching Band. Ooh. And they play a medley of songs, including the theme from Chariots of Fire. And the band continued to play for the entire Parade of Nations, which included 192 teams. And now you cannot have an Australian event without Olivia Newton John.

She comes on to sing with John Farnham, the official theme of the 2000 Olympics, which was Dare to Dream. We know exactly what this song looked and sounded like. So now we get into Boring Speech, Boring Speech. When Antonio Samaranch attempted to say good day Australia,

Governor General of Australia, Sir William Dean, declared the games open. You’ve got more inspirational music. You have a children’s choir. You have an inspirational film montage. Okay. Now here comes the flame. The flame.

This is a good one. Oh my gosh. Has finally arrived. Right up there. This was fantastic.

So all the final torch bearers that came into the stadium were female Australian Olympians.

Uh, it started with full four time gold medalist, Betty Cuthbert and swimming legend, Dawn Fraser. So they go in order historically down the line comes to the final torch bearer, Cathy Freeman. We’re going to do a whole show on Cathy Freeman. So hold that thought. She is really important, but I will say for now, you can’t underestimate what a moment this was to have Cathy Freeman holding that torch.

Unfortunately, for Freeman, what we remember of this moment is, shall we say, a technical glitch. So the cauldron is in a circle of fire, water. So she’s standing in a circle in a pool of water. She lights the flame, the flame emerges out of the water above her head and around her, and then it just stops.

The hydraulic arm was supposed to take the circle of fire out of the water. up the ramp to the top of the stadium. It got it above Cathy Freeman’s head and water is running off this cauldron onto poor Cathy Freeman. We may lose the potential Olympic running champion because she’s going to drown in this waterfall.

Or catch cold because we

Jill Jaracz: are getting into spring.

Alison Brown: Here.

She was absolutely soaked and the disc just stood there. The choir keeps singing, the orchestra keeps playing, and for three minutes and 51 seconds, the cauldron does not move. And John Coates later told the press that at the moment he was thinking, just leave it.

Let them think that was supposed to happen. We’ll fix it tomorrow.

Behind the scenes, engineers were frantically scrambling to find what was going wrong. They finally had to manually override a malfunctioning limit switch, which finally got this thing movement and it lurched and it shook and it bounced and it got its way to the top. of the stadium. Cue the fireworks.

Sydney 2000 Paralympics Opening Ceremony

Alison Brown: Not to be outdone. We got a little on the Paralympic opening ceremony, which happened about a month later, Wednesday, October 18th. Rain had threatened to ruin the party, but the showers ended early enough for workers to drain puddles and dry floors. And if you want to see some funny pictures, see these poor guys frantically trying to dry the floor.

About 6, 000 performers. participated, joined by the narrator, Australian actor Brian Brown, who people of my age will remember as the rejected husband in the Thornbirds. The show included rock bands, singing children, many performers with disabilities, lots of guitars, a filmed appearance by Stephen Hawking.

Oh, wow. A lot of balloons. Producers seem to really rely on balloons to wow the crowd. There were giant bird balloons, bug balloons, fish balloons, which may have been recycled from the Olympic opening ceremony and their ocean part. Uh, hundreds of dancers with balloons on strings. The country signs during the parade of nations were giant balloons filled with more balloons in the national colors of each country.

The helium budget for this opening ceremony was not to be believed.

Jill Jaracz: And you know, someone backstage who had to blow up all those balloons was like taking a hit themselves to let, make everyone laugh.

Alison Brown: You know, there were probably hundreds of Australians having helium poisoning that night. It just, that alone may have killed half the seals in Sydney Harbour.

I mean, the balloons were out of control. Australian wheelchair racer Louise Sauvage lit the cauldron and it was the same one used for the Olympics. The Paralympics did not use the waterfall or the hydraulic arm, so there was no technical glitches. Louise raced in four Paralympic Games and won a gold medal at every distance between 100 and 5, 000 metres.

Very worthy cauldron lighter.

Jill Jaracz: We had the boring, so wait, I have a question. Was the cauldron, if it didn’t go up the ramp, was it already up there or did it stay down?

Alison Brown: Here’s the problem with this issue. There is not a full video of the Paralympic ceremony. So I think it stayed down. And then they did a vis, a visual sort of, as if the flame were ricocheting around and then went up.

Jill Jaracz: Oh, okay. That’s pretty cool. So

Alison Brown: it was more symbolic

Jill Jaracz: Okay.

Alison Brown: Than movement. Nobody got stuck. Going up the ramp. You’ve got all your oaths. You’ve got your speeches. You have your more inspirational music, but we are going to close out the show with the absolute highlight. Australian pop star Kylie Minogue. Yes, it has.

She does a three song She starts wearing her brown crench coat and a very quiet version of Walsing Matilda. And if you don’t know who Kylie Minogue is, what is wrong with you? You have to see this. She is fantastic. And when she’s singing Walsing Matilda, because we remember her as kind of a A bubblegum pop star, but man, does that woman know how to sing, gorgeous.

But she does not rely on her pipes alone. The trench coat is ripped off to reveal a golden jumpsuit. She is joined by dozens of dancers on stage in a full blown presentation of Kool and the Gang Celebration.

It was like, This is gonna be good. Every wedding from the 1990s. It was fantastic. She closed out with her hit of the time, Spinning Around, which was like number one in Australia, but was unfamiliar to me. To be followed with the typical fireworks. Let the competition begin.

Jill Jaracz: Oh, excellent. Excellent.

Sources

Jill Jaracz: We’ve got a lot of sources from here.

In my story, I got my information from the Australian Olympic Committee, the BBC, candidature files from all the cities, the ones who made the last bids, gamesbids. com, the Guardian. the IOC, the International Society of Olympic Historians Journal, the International Herald Tribune, New York Times, uh, the Sydney Morning Herald, Washington Post, and uh, some YouTube videos, specifically Tanya Blenko.

And we will

Alison Brown: have links to the YouTube videos of these opening ceremonies. They are fantastic. And my additional sources are olympics. com, ABC News, The Daily Telegraph, IMDB, paralympics. org and ESPN.

Jill Jaracz: Excellent. Well, this is starting off with a bang already. And Seriously, I remember how much of a big deal the aboriginal situation was because as white people want to do, go in and, uh, ruin the existing population for lack of a better word.

Alison Brown: You know, we saw it in Vancouver. We’ve seen it in some other countries, you know, the United States, Canada, Australia all have this similar history that we all have to tackle. And it seems like the Olympics becomes a focal point. In the 90s and, and early aughts and into the 2010s to tackle this really difficult part of, colonial history.

Jill Jaracz: So we’ll see if that touches on different themes throughout the, history moment shows this year, but that is one really important thing that I want to make sure we remember is just how much reconciliation and acknowledgement played a part in these games.

Coming Soon

Jill Jaracz: all right. Well, that does it for this episode of the show We will be back next week we’re going to get into some winter sports because milan is on the brain And one of the things, this was really exciting. We talked with the head of USA’s Ski Mountaineering, Sarah Cookler, and she tells us all about the sport and how it works, answers a ton of questions we have, gets us really excited to watch the sport.

it’s going to be cool. I think it’s going to be fun to watch. So come and join us next week with that and please keep in touch.

Share your Sydney 2000 memories!

Jill Jaracz: Oh, and, and please let us know what you remember from Sydney.

Alison Brown: And we do love hearing from you. You can chat with us and other listeners on our Facebook group, Keep the Flame Alive podcast, email us at flamealivepod at gmail. com. The voicemail and text line is always open at 208 833 4255. 4 8. That’s 2 0 8 flame it.

That’s 2 0 8 flame it. If you need more Olympics and Paralympics in your life, and who doesn’t, sign up for our newsletter at flamealivepod. com. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

Jill Jaracz: Or we’re on Substack now. So if you’re on Substack already, look for us there and just add us to your Substack reading list.

So that does it for this time. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, keep the flame alive.