In our final episode on the Sydney 2000 Olympics and Paralympics, we look at the Paralympic Closing Ceremonies and the legacies of these “best ever” Games.
The Paralympic Closing Ceremonies
Alison gets us going with the fantastic celebration that is the Closing Ceremonies of the Paralympics. It’s much different that that for the Olympics, but it’s equally as fun. She’s also thrilled that the demon chicken has returned to the Paralympic Closing Ceremony. Seriously, what is this? And why?
What is going on with this chicken, Sydney 2000?
The Sydney 2000 Paralympic Closing Ceremonies have more fun elements to them, including stuff you shouldn’t try at home, lots of music, more floating animals, and plenty of fireworks. Watch the whole shebang here:
At their respective Closing Ceremonies, International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch and International Paralympic Committee President Dr. Robert Steadward both proclaimed these Games the “best ever.” However, did that feel-good feeling stick around once the fireworks died out and real life started again? What legacy did the Sydney 2000 Games leave behind?
Legacies of the Sydney 2020 Olympics and Paralympics
Jill examines the legacy (both good and questionable) of these Games across many points. Organizers constructed 18 new venues for the Games, including the massive Sydney Olympic Park. That legacy is mixed, but could be improving over the next decade. Also, it’s possible to stay in Athletes’ Village accommodations–and not just in Sydney! Some of the villas are in places like Rainbow Beach Holiday Village in Queensland.
As Alison discussed earlier in our series, Australia’s history with its Aboriginal population was rocky (to say the least), but did the light shed on this situation during the Games really change attitudes and policies? Let’s just say it took a while for the federal government to apologize for its role in creating the Stolen Generations of children taken from their Aboriginal and Torres Strait homes.
And of course, we need to talk about money. When the Games are in planning stages, forecasts are usually rosy, and that’s no different for Sydney 2000. KPMG estimated that the Games would add more than $7 billion to the economy, but it didn’t help that the Games went 90% over budget.
As varied as the legacies for the Olympics can be, Sydney 2000 had a massive positive impact on the Paralympic movement. It was the first Organizing Committee to partner its Olympic and Paralympic staffs, which made for more streamlined operations. They set new standards for how to stage a Paralympics and how to treat Paralympians.
The results were phenomenal: Record-breaking ticket sales, more (and better) media coverage and improved accessibility in Sydney. A massive educational program improved citizens’ awareness and attitudes toward those with disabilities. After the Games, the IOC and IPC solidified agreements to continue their partnership, which has helped the IPC expand in its mission to promote para sport.
It’s been a whirlwind year looking back at these Games, and we weren’t disappointed with our memories of them!
Find a complete list of sources used in this episode here.
Next year, our history episodes will focus on the 1956 Winter Olympics at Cortina d’Ampezzo as it celebrates its 70th anniversary. What will we learn about those Games by being there for Milano Cortina 2026?
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Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!
TRANSCRIPT
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421-Sydney 2000-Paralympic Closing Ceremony and Games Legacy
Jill Jaracz: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to another history episode of Keep the Flame Alive, the podcast for fans of the Olympics and Paralympics. If you love the games, we are the show for you. I’m your host, Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co-host, Alison Brown. Alison. Hello, good day. Last time.
Alison Brown: I was gonna say I’m a little sad.
This is our last visit to Sydney and it has been so much fun looking back on the stuff that we remembered and we said at the beginning, there’s a lot of Sydney, we remember and that as we were going along, we realized how much of Sydney we either didn’t remember or didn’t know, and how fantastic the these games really, really were.
Jill Jaracz: They were. And we’ll be looking at legacy today. We’ll be looking at the Paralympics closing ceremony today, uh, which had to be a show to not miss.
Alison Brown: We talked about Olympic closing ceremony last time, but there was so much closing ceremony antics that we couldn’t [00:01:00] contain it in into one episode, so we had to, to split it up because as you would expect from the other three ceremonies that we’ve talked to, the paralympic closing ceremony did not disappoint.
Patron of the Week
Jill Jaracz: Excellent. I will look forward to that. But first, we need to give a shout out to our patron of the week, Lori Luri. Again, someone who does not disappoint. Lori has been such a good supporter of the show for years and years. She’s bailed this out of walking around the streets of Paris late at night.
Alison Brown: She sent us the sweetest note when we were in Paris.
Like, I’m worried about you ladies. Here’s, here’s some cab fair. So thank you so much for that, Lori. Not just for the cab fair, but for the note that that kind of bolstered us in some, in some down moments in Paris.
Jill Jaracz: Yes, yes, yes. And we truly appreciate how much you support the show, how much fun it is to hang out with you on.
The, the group and on other social media platforms. [00:02:00] and, it’s fun to hang out with you there and, uh, have you be part of the Stan community. So thank you so much and if you too would like a shout out, you can go to flame alife pod.com/support to find out more.
Sydney 2000: The Paralympics Closing Ceremony
Jill Jaracz: Let’s get. Into Paralympics closing ceremony.
Alison Brown: So this is the last party of the games and it ended on October 29th. Again, we’re back at Stadium Australia and the show started off with a bang. ’cause usually the fireworks are at the end. No, they put fireworks right off the top and it was lot of fireworks. But now we have our favorite element that we discovered last time.
The large inflatable creatures that have been used in the other ceremonies. So we’ve got fish, snakes, and the demon chicken. Oh, right, good. Can’t have a ceremony in Sydney without the demon chicken. And they’ve all got rhythmic drums playing in the background. And then a big sign comes on the jumbotron that [00:03:00] says, don’t try this at home.
And why would we need that? Because we’ve got Aerialists from the Flying. No, the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, which is Australia’s National Youth Circus, and they performed off a 12 meter high truss, spinning on ropes, swinging across, across trapeze. They have people doing the silk rope. Thing where you spin down.
That always freaked me out more than anything else because I’m always like, that rope is gonna tear. And their skin was painted green and they squirted turquoise, orange, and purple wigs. Okay, so next we get the business portion of the night where IPC President at the time, Dr. Robert Stead. Edward called the Sydney Games a quote, sheer delight, and an absolutely outstanding event.
And he, like Juan Antonio at the Olympics, called these Paralympics the best ever. And Dr. Sted Edward presented Dr. John Grant, who was the president of the Sydney Paralympics [00:04:00] Organizing Committee with the Paralympic Gold Order. And the fun thing about these orders, both the Paralympic and the Olympic, they are really snazzy.
They have always been says there are these giant emblems with the big heavy chains. It looks like something out of a medieval university, and I love that. And so next, Dr. Ted Edward declared the games closed and the flag featuring an earlier version of the atos is lowered and marched out of the stadium, and the cauldron is extinguished.
So now that the formal portion is done. We get to the fun part. So the flag is handed over to the deputy mayor of Athens, followed up by a performance by the millennial choirs of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese performing the Greek hymn intelligible Son of justice sounds appropriately Greek. We get 200, children in the choir.
’cause you can’t have a ceremony without a children’s choir. And these are children from the Greco Australian [00:05:00] community. So check on that piece. And now it’s carnival time. There’s Lizzie, our amazing, thrilled lizard mascot dancing with stilt walkers and Sydney teenagers. And finally the Paralympians themselves get to take the field and the beach balls in the shape of gumball machines, and they have balls inside the balls.
Oh, wow. Exactly. They start flying around the fields with the athletes. So now we get the closing concert. First up, a very young Keith Urban get out and yes, his hair was always that bad.
So then we get Jimmy Barnes and the seekers, the Whitlams Wicked Beat Sound System. Who is as funky as it sounds, and Graham Connors performing the official anthem for the Sydney Paralympics called being here and it sounds appropriately, oh, it’s [00:06:00] an anthem for Paralympics. So on the broadcast we get lots of closeups of the athletes dancing on the field, tossing around the giant gumball machines and interacting with the performers.
So it seems like the athletes really enjoyed this concert and really got into it, the mood coming through the broadcast. Was just so excited and joyful and thankfully not as, freakish, if I can say that as some of the Olympic pieces and also much shorter than the Olympic one. as was the case. So the concert closes with the most appropriate song that they could come up with called the Carnival is Over.
And they closed with a rocket flying overhead. More fireworks and more fireworks. And then the announcement that the show is over and it is time to say goodbye to Sydney for the last time.
Jill Jaracz: Aw,
that is sad. Sad. And the demon
Alison Brown: [00:07:00] chicken, nothing has made me. Happier in our adventures in Sydney as my time with the demon check-in. I, I hope it’s still around and appears at Sydney parades and events and things.
How does the Sydney 2000 Paralympic Closing Ceremonies rate?
Jill Jaracz: Excellent, excellent. So closing ceremony, how, how do you rate that one,
Alison Brown: you know. It’s a little hard when you look at Paralympic closing ceremonies from this era, because clearly they were smaller scale.
The Paralympics were a smaller scale. The money wasn’t quite there as it is today, but man, it was a goodie. I would at least give it an eight out of 10. Oh, nice. Yeah, it was a, it was a good one, and it had the right. Blend of the serious emotion and the joy and the sadness of it ending, but most importantly, it looked like the athletes had a fantastic time.
Jill Jaracz: Good. Excellent. Excellent.
Help your favorite Olympics and Paralympics podcast get to Milano Cortina 2026
Jill Jaracz: You know, who might have an excellent [00:08:00] time at a Paralympics closing ceremony? Um, us That would be us hopefully, if we could get to Milan and, Cover the Olympics. end Paralympics as we intend to, We have planned to do 32 daily shows from Milano Cortina, both the Olympics and the Paralympics, but undertaking that endeavor is pretty expensive and we need the support from Shuk Stan to get there.
Our team, Keith Flame alive. you mean the world to us listeners. And many, many of you have stepped up. we’re over 50% of the way to our goal.
Alison Brown: We’re al we’re almost at the two third point. I love fractions. We’re almost at the two third point. So if you can, you know, throw us a little bit over that barrier, that’s always a great, milestone to hit.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. So if you visit flame alive pod.com, you’ll see a popup there. It’s also at the top of our website to uh, support our fundraiser. [00:09:00] We have a lot of thank you gifts that are very cool, doing something new with show shout outs this year. So that’s cool. You could be a mascot. Your, your pet could be a mascot.
Alison Brown: You yourself could be a mascot, honestly. Yeah, if you
Jill Jaracz: wanted to.
Alison Brown: Yeah, I would. I would go for that. Having human mascots, I mean, hey, little Lilyhammer did it, so I would totally do that. If you want your kids to be our mascot for a day, I’d be cool with that.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, I would as well. So yes. Flame Alive, pod.com.
You’ll see the popup. Help us get to Milana Corina and let you know whether or not those Paralympic ceremonies are as cool as the ones from Sydney.
The Legacy of Sydney 2000
Jill Jaracz: I have got legacy. Yes, so, so let’s buckle up.
Alison Brown: Games are over. So now we finally said goodbye to Sydney. We’ve got 25 years of legacy. That you’ve come up with?
Jill Jaracz: Yes. And these games provided some amazing moments in sports history. They brought the world together in a celebration that was full of Australian [00:10:00] hospitality. David Meadow reported in the Daily Telegraph that some of the 50,000 volunteers proudly wore their uniforms for years after these games.
Both IOC President, uh, Juan Antonio Samran and the IPC President Robert Ward both pronounce them the best games ever. How did that pan out in terms of legacy?
What happened to the Sydney 2000 venues?
Jill Jaracz: Well, it’s complicated. So let’s first look at the venues. We are still in the era of big construction for the Olympics and Sydney built 18 new venues for these games. Wow. that is a lot. It’s a lot. Including a massive 640 hectare site known as Sydney Olympic Park, which contained the Olympic Stadium, several other venues, a Grand Boulevard, a train station, and 430 hectares of park and wetlands.
So. Building that site meant undertaking this massive environmental remediation of toxic waste [00:11:00] project, and it was one of the largest contaminated sites in any Australian city. 20 years later, regional economist Terry Ronsley said that if it weren’t for the Olympics, that wasteland might still exist. And instead, the New South Wales government spent 130 million Australian dollars to clean up the site.
And that effort transformed the area, also transformed nearby suburbs. And even though Olympic Stadium itself gave the city its first large multipurpose stadium, the New South Wales government toyed with demolishing it in 2017. Right. Why you build a giant stadium to tear it down 17 years later? I mean, we we’re in the middle of a, big stadium issue here in Cleveland and the fact that developers or sports team owners want to build giant [00:12:00] expensive stadiums on mostly on tax dollar taxpayer dollars.
and then tear them down within a couple of decades is just flabbergasting to me why they think that we have these open pocket books. But, that did not happen. the stadium turned out to be not great for what the city needed. it’s too big, it’s got lousy sight lines. However, they did keep it.
They refurbished it. Again, that wasn’t the first time it refurbished the stadium, so think about the money that went into that too. after the games, its capacity was reduced from 110,000 to 83,500. It’s still a giant stadium. It is now home to three rugby league teams, a rugby union team, and national teams for football and rugby.
It hosts 50 plus events per year, and in the 2324 fiscal year welcomed 11.9 million visitors. But the park, the Sydney Olympic Park has this dubious legacy. The park lands [00:13:00] have been incredible, a huge success, enjoyed by over 10 million people annually. They take really good care of them and are good stewards of the environment.
With that, as of the 20th anniversary of the games, the rest of the park doesn’t really live up to the hopes, in part because there was no long-term vision. There’s aton of cement to walk on the road. Design of the time didn’t help. So back then, winding roads were popular and, uh. If they had made a grid instead, that would’ve been more walkable.
So now you have this area that’s not super walkable, it’s not really accessible by train. There’s a train stop there, but it only goes to one station. So you basically, if you wanted to go to Olympic Park, you currently have to. Get on a train and then take it to the one stop that you can transfer to the Olympic Park line.
And it’s [00:14:00] one stop there. So it’s not horrible, but it’s complicated. It’s just kind of this offshoot thing, that ends up, meaning that people drive in, they go to their event and they leave. So it’s not
Alison Brown: like they’re getting the, the experience of the venue. It’s all just this. I go to my. Concert and then turn around and drive
Jill Jaracz: out
Alison Brown: E
Jill Jaracz: Exactly.
So that means it’s been really hard to build a vibrant business district around the area. And the athletes Village is just far enough away that the people who live there, and it’s really only a couple kilometers, but it’s far enough away that people who live there don’t hang out in the Olympic Park district apparently as, uh, James Wyrick.
A professor in urban development and design at the University of South Wales who criticized the plans for the district said in 2020. The place was too big and that everything was too spread out to support a vibrant, urban atmosphere. And he said, quote at the ti at the moment, we had the worst of both worlds.
Neither a great sports park nor an [00:15:00] area with an urban identity or character. The vast paved area in front of the stadium creates the emptiness of the place. It is so empty at times. That energy leaks out. End quote. And I will say I, I did find a lot more about. At the 20th anniversary Legacy than I did of 25 years, and ran outta time.
But, but it’s interesting to see. I don’t think. There are some changes that are in the works. Uh, the New South Wales government is building a new underground metro line. It’s the Sydney Metro West, which will go from the Central Business District west to Westmead, and it has just completed the tunneling for the Western end.
Sydney Olympic Park will have a new station along this line, so it will be more accessible and easier to get to in 2032 when it opens.
Alison Brown: Well, at least they’re able to. Correct the mistake.
Jill Jaracz: Mm-hmm.
Alison Brown: Just taking a, it just takes long time. Yeah.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. So there, I mean, there’s parks there, there’s, there’s [00:16:00] stuff, and people do use the pool.
They do use some of the other venues. But yeah, it really is, you got the feeling that it’s not as hustle and bustle as you would hope. I, I saw some, Claims that the area was like the fifth largest in Sydney in terms of economic output. But that also doesn’t mean necessarily like, do people go there to work and then they go home?
Or do they go and they, they stay. So, uh, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a mixed bag with the Olympic Park. The Athletes Village Village is a different success story. So they turned that into a solar powered residential area within the suburb of Newington, and it’s still one of the most sustainable neighborhoods in Australia.
Saw that one of the homes is currently for sale. You two could live in the Olympic Village. It’s a 261 meter square, three bedroom, two bathhouse. That’s estimated to cost 1.79 million Australian dollars. So it’s sustainable, not affordable. [00:17:00] Right. I I think that’s a, there’s a problem in with Australian housing anyway, so you, you have the same issue.
The Athletes Village also contained some temporary villas and those were shipped to different locations around the country. 12 ended up in Rainbow Beach, north of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, and they’re part of a caravan park.
That serves tourists. So you could go to this, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a bunch of little cabins and some of the cabins are left over from the, the Olympics.
Alison Brown: Oh. It’s like in Montreal how sometimes you can rent some of the people have the, the spaces that you can Airbnb.
Jill Jaracz: Uh, no, no, this is like a little, they have these things called caravan parks there, and they’re really cool where they’re little like cabins.
Oh, and they’re all situated in this park. And I think if you had a trailer, you could bring your trailer and hook, hook it up. But, um, they do have little. Little cabins or villas, for lack of a better word. And basically you and your family rent a little cabin and they have a pool or [00:18:00] whatever there. It’s, it’s a step up from a campground, I would say, but similar to that element.
So yes, they’ve got some of these there. So that, that I thought was really cool. How about the rest of the venues?
You’ll be happy to hear that all of the new venues remain in use. Excellent. The three temporary V venues for beach volleyball, triathlon and road cycling were dismantled while temporary venues saved money. 25 years later, Sydney, 2000 Beach volleyball gold medalist, Carrie Pottharst, said on Sport Nation and Z, that the gains were incredible, but the legacy wasn’t there.
interns of beach volleyball because access is to facilities is what fosters the next generation of players. And I got the impression that if they had meant a per uh, made a permanent site, it would’ve attracted more people to the sport. you know, it’s, it’s that six of one, half a dozen of the other kind of thing do, if you have a stadium on a beach, does that [00:19:00] help or does it take away from the beach element of it?
There are nine existing venues that Sydney had. Eight of them are still standing and are in use. The one that was demolished was the Sydney Entertainment Center, which was used for volleyball. It was opened in 1983 and demolished 33 later, years later in 2016. So again, we have another stadium that was.
Only lasted 30 some years. It had been a much used concert sporting and theater venue, but now it’s a residential development part of the redevelopment of Darling Harbor. So. Housing is an issue in a way that’s good. I won’t go through all the stadiums that still exist, but the Sydney Superdome, which had artistic gymnastics, trampoline, and basketball, is now called the Kudos Bank Arena for the year ending 2023.
It ranked in the top 10 of billboards venue rankings for around the world.
Alison Brown: Good for them.
Jill Jaracz: Although the marathon venue no longer exists, the marathon itself lives on the [00:20:00] marathon test event was transformed into the TCS Sydney Marathon. It still has the Sydney 2000 start location in North Sydney. The route includes running over the Sydney Harbor Bridge, around the rocks, the circular key, and Centennial Park, the finishes in front of the Sydney Opera House.
This race has grown to become the largest marathon in Australia and is a world athletics platinum label marathon. And in November, 2024, it was ab added to the Abbott World Marathon Majors as the newest one of those. And in 2025, it had 35,000 runners from over 120 countries. And for the 25th anniversary, the race volunteers wore uniforms inspired by the Sydney games.
Alison Brown: And probably some people broke out their uniforms, their your uniforms came out and said, I’m an og.
What happened to the relationship with Australia’s Indigenous people?
Jill Jaracz: Another element of the gains was the country’s relationship with its indigenous people, which was highlighted in the ceremonies in [00:21:00] May, 2000. Ahead of the games, 250,000 people walked across the Sydney Harbor Bridge in support of indigenous reconciliation. So the topic was really a main talking point. In the day, per the 1991 Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act, the national government was supposed to achieve reconciliation by 2001.
The act didn’t really specify what that meant, so no one really knew if the goals were met by that deadline. The 1997, bringing them home report about the stolen generations of children taken from their Aboriginal and Torres Strait homes recommended that all Australian governments apologize for these policies and practices, and by 1999, so ahead of the games, states and territory governments had done that.
But it wasn’t until February 13th, 2008 that the federal government formally apologized for its actions. On the conversation.com David wrote, wrote that although Sydney 2000 did not do much [00:22:00] to change the lives of aboriginals, it was the catalyst for how Australia represented itself, which from then on always had a deep, serious indigenous pre presence in everything, which we see that in the team.
Australian uniforms, they all have to have, an indigenous element to them.
How did the Sydney 2000 Olympics do financially?
Jill Jaracz: And of course, let’s talk money.
Alison Brown: Your favorite topic,
Jill Jaracz: I love it. But ahead of any games, economists forecasts are rosy and KPMG predicted that Sydney 2000 would cause $7.1 billion in growth between 91 and 2004. It’s a long time.
To be quite honest, uh, in 2007 modeling done by academics, John Madden and James, uh, geka, uh, geka found that between 97 and 2005, so we’re not really talking apples to apples here. there was a $2.1 billion decline in household and government consumption.
Alison Brown: So even if you’re not apples to apples. You are definitely in a [00:23:00] rotten apple category.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. Right. ’cause it’s not like there was some
Alison Brown: growth, but maybe not as much. No, we have a decline.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another economic analysis found that construction spurred a 5% growth in the city’s economy during the two years ahead of the games. but after 2000, the annual growth rate plummeted and remained low for several years.
I, you know, you build. 18 new venues. What happens next? Uh, the games are not fully responsible for that decline, though all told the final price was pretty big in 2002. The New South Wales Auditor General released a report saying that the games cost. 6.484 billion Australian dollars. The government paid for just over 2 billion.
It estimated that games tourism brought in 653 million, but all told the games lost. 1.326 billion in 2020. Researchers from Oxford University noted that Sydney blew its budget by 90%.
Alison Brown: [00:24:00] Oh, wow. 90%. Well, that’s, you know, if we look at the next couple games after this Athens mm-hmm. That, that 90% they would’ve been happy with.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Alison Brown: And same with, uh, Rio is way off the charts too. Right. And China and Beijing 2008, we’ll never know what the real numbers were.
Jill Jaracz: Right. Right.
But the people of New South South Wales saw that as an investment in public works, and they were pretty okay with it because the government didn’t really feel any backlash at the polls. Apparently,
How did Sydney 2000 do as an organization?
Jill Jaracz: organizationally, the Sydney 2000 Olympics was the first games that had a formal evaluation and knowledge transfer program in place to help feature hosts.
that was kind of a big deal because I think everybody beforehand was. Running just kind of on the fly or they had to hope that the final report that the previous games had put out, said enough to guide them on how to do [00:25:00] things. But now we have a formal knowledge transfer program.
We see that ourselves when we’ve got, like I talked with some LA 2028 people at, uh, Paris 2024. You famously rode with Paris. 2024 people in Beijing got rescued.
Alison Brown: I’ll be forever grateful. So they’re, they’re thinking about it ahead of time, which was different than what was done at that time.
Sydney 2000’s incredible Paralympic legacy
Jill Jaracz: In terms of the Paralympic movement, Sydney was a game changer. these games, had a big challenge. And then that Atlanta 1996 did not put in the same effort and organization into the 96 Paralympics that set back the strides made by EO 88 and Barcelona in 1992, Sydney opted to have its Olympic and Paralympic organizing committees Partner to put on both games and the cultural Olympiad, this was the first time an organizing committee had done both the Olympics and Paralympics. And the difference really showed from the outset the vision of the Paralympic Organizing Committee was to set new standards for how to stage the games.
They focused on how they could enable great athletic performances. The Olympic and Paralympic organizing committees partnered with each other to streamline organizational elements. Paralympians were treated as elite athletes and therefore equal to Olympians, something which hadn’t always happened.
And after Sydney, that treatment would continue on at future games.
Alison Brown: And I remember we’ve spoken to people who were at both, Sydney and Atlanta and talked about how night and day those two Paralympics were that Atlanta, they felt. How afterthought they were and how in Sydney they were treated like the professional elite athletes that they are.
Jill Jaracz: Right. And we see that today. I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s happened all the time because Rio had problems, but, it’s happened and I think it’s getting better and better, and we’re getting more into the mainstream. This, we’re still at a time where Paralympics is not. They’re just trying to [00:27:00] get into the mainstream.
They do okay in, in Australia in terms of media coverage, but, it, it’s still hard to get the media attention. These Paralympics broke records in terms of ticket sales. They sold over 1 million tickets for the first time with many people seeing Paralympic sport for the first time, and that helped change the attitudes of able-bodied people towards those with a disability.
It got people interested in parasport, depending on the source. Some 360 to 400,000 plus schoolchildren. Got to see the games, another record, and that helped normalize Parasport for younger generations. The games had record athlete participation, global broadcast coverage, merch sales and media attendance.
All staff and contractors had disability awareness training, and the media also focused on disability awareness leading up to the games. Lizzie proved to be a very popular mascot.
Alison Brown: Yes, she had some staying power. We’ve talked about
Jill Jaracz: after the. The Paralympics Organizing Committee disbanded. The [00:28:00] Australian Paralympic Committee got the rights to Lizzie and they still use her today because I just saw on Instagram they posted not long ago a video with Lizzie.
that’s also cool. That’s another. Paralympic mascot that has staying power. ’cause we’ve talked about how Blaze, the Phoenix from Atlanta, 1996, has been, kept by another organization and they use it. Uh, these games also drove the formation of what was to be called the Oceana Paralympic Committee.
Australian para athletes benefited from higher funding ahead of the games. Paralympics Australia’s Paralympic preparation program served as the blueprint for other talent development programs. Funding for the A PC has grown steadily in the years following the games. In 1999, 2000, the Australian Sports Commission funded 2.81 million.
Australian dollars in grants to the A A PC and Paralympics and other disabled groups. In 24 25, the Sports Commission invested 54 million in Paralympic sport. So [00:29:00] that, that’s really grown in the following years. the organizing committee also did a reaching the community program that did wonders to educate school children and seniors and help change Australians perceptions about disabilities and.
Sydney 2000 marks a turning point for the IOC’s and IPC’s working relationship
Jill Jaracz: I think importantly for the Paralympic movement, this game fostered better relations between the IOC and the IPC and while the, the two organization organizations have been in conversation for many years, forward progress for the IPC really came with Sydney 2000 in October, 2000. The organizations.
Signed a memorandum of understanding that gave the IPC representation on IOC commissions. And then in June, 2001, they signed another memorandum of understanding that stipulated an Olympic host city must also host the Paralympics. And that was huge.
Alison Brown: And now we see them doing so many things. In concert and now they have the advertising, uh, together and the [00:30:00] sponsorships together and the United States, Olympic and Paralympic Committee are now one committee.
So we saw we, this is a big step forward in bringing those two movements together.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, and it really helps. The Paralympic committee who has, is much smaller than the. IOC, it, it really helps them in terms of being able to find hosted, like having to duplicate all this work that they don’t necessarily have the resources to do.
And they, they talked about in some of the things I read, how they would have hard times finding host cities at all for the Paralympics. Nobody just really wanted to host them. Sydney was also the first Paralympic organizing committee to have better knowledge transfer systems in place. It was the first to create a detailed post games report for the Paralympics, like the Olympic side does.
But now for the first time for the Paralympic side, it also had about a hundred Greek postgraduate students working on the Paralympic operations who ended up working on Athens 24 or um, who ended up working on Athens 2004 Paralympics as well. And. I had read a little bit about how disabled people in Athens and in Greece were seen quite differently, and there was allusions to the need for a lot of disability awareness, education, but this program kind of helped train people up in order to make Athens a good experience.
Accessibility around Sydney, improved ahead of the games. Many venues, like the Opera House were not easily accessible, but many buildings made changes. Many streets also became easier to navigate for wheelchair users and those with visual impairments.
What did hosting the Olympics and Paralympics do for Sydney?
Jill Jaracz: Not everything they did was perfect. But the Sydney 2000 Paralympics pushed the movement and parasport forward in new ways that has helped the Paralympic movement grow. So overall Sydney was able to use the games to project itself as a sophisticated city and [00:32:00] showcase the country as a multicultural nation.
Timing was also on Sydney’s side. It hosted during a big growth and globalization at the beginning of a boom in international education. And, when tour new tourism markets like China were just opening up. And it was like right ahead of the big. internet.com boom too. So you have, it’s just a lot of excitement going on.
Alison Brown: You know, this was the era where cities really saw the Olympics especially, and then the Paralympics as a way to introduce the city on the global stage. I remember Barcelona was very much of that ilk where it’s, yeah, we’ve all heard of Barcelona, but what’s this city about? And Sydney was kind of the pinnacle of that, especially for.
North Americans and probably Europeans, you know, what is Sydney all about? It’s a lot more than just this image of the Opera house.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. And they also showed how Sydney and Australia could get stuff done. So this [00:33:00] helped propel. Australia and Sydney in, as a global city economically, it spurred investor confidence.
It improved the export industry as well. So Sydney really got a, a bump up in terms of not just being a, a place for tourism, it’s a place to do business as well. Uh, Sydney also proved itself more than capable of hosting major sports events. Since then, the city’s been a host for multiple mega events like the 2003 Rugby World Cup, which used some Olympic venues.
Also, the 2015 Cricket World Cup and the 2023 Women’s World Cup among others. And maybe more importantly for us, Sydney’s games did not follow Atlanta, 1990 six’s example and become overly commercialized. So in a way, following Atlanta and producing the 2000 games the way they did, they did a lot to recreate that feeling of Olympic spirit that we may have lost four years before.
So five O for Sydnee.
Sources [00:34:00] for this. Alison used the Paralympics Closing Ceremonies video. I used realestate.com au. Australian Leisure Management, Australian Athletics International Herald Tribune. Uh, a C News, multiple contributors from. Simon Darcy and Lois Applebee from Paralympic Legacies Sport nation.nz, the International Olympic Committee Architecture Au Paralympics, Australia.
The Daily Telegraph, EDIA, the Olympics, study Center olympics.com. Multiple contributors from the Sydney Morning Herald. Parliament of Australia, the conversation.com. Sydney Metro, TCS, Sydney Marathon, tourism Research Australia apartments.com au and the Australian Sports Commission.
We’ll have a link to all of our sources in the show notes.
Our favorite stories from Sydney 2000
Alison Brown: I was just thinking, we didn’t talk about this ahead of time, but of the 12 stories that we’ve done each, do you have a favorite of yours?
Jill Jaracz: [00:35:00] Hmm. Let me look
Alison Brown: because I have a favorite of yours.
Jill Jaracz: Oh, really? Yes. I mean, I do like Rulan Gardner. That’s a good story. You can’t go wrong with Rulan Gardner. I mean, they’re all interesting in their own ways and I, I think it’s the, pleasant surprise of finding a story I didn’t know about, which of course, with as many thousands of athletes that are there, there are thousands and thousands of stories that you just don’t know.
Uncovering some of those were really good. But, uh, yeah, looking at the, the quick list, may maybe Roman Greco Roman,
Alison Brown: my favorite of yours was actually the Mary and Jones story, which is really the saddest story we told, but just the twists and turns of that and how much more complicated that era of doping [00:36:00] was.
It’s so important for us to remember.
Jill Jaracz: And the, The Belco guy, he just died.
Victor Conti, the Belco founder at the center of the steroid scandal for Barry Bonds. Jason gm, B baseball players, and Marian Jones died in November. He was 75 years old.
So, yeah, and there’s, I mean, it’s tough. it’s gotten really tough and it’s tough to see so many results that have been changed due to drugs and so many people who did not get the medal ceremony at all, who did not get the medal ceremony that they thought they were going to get, that they deserved.
and the benefits that come with being a medalist. I mean, we’ve, we’ve talked about this before, but yeah, it just how much doping really hurt and it really put a tarnish on some of the [00:37:00] performances of these games.
Alison Brown: Yeah, absolutely.
Jill Jaracz: How about your favorite story?
Alison Brown: I wanna say Kathy Freeman. Because it’s always talk about a feel good story, but I think the story that means the most to me is the gymnastics one, because that was literally the story I wanted to tell since we’ve been doing the show.
You know, where the vault was set at the wrong height and what that did to the gymnast in that women’s all around competition.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, I’m really glad that you got into that because it It was just a horrible thing to have happened,
Alison Brown: a simple mistake, and yet it altered the lives of every girl in that competition,
Jill Jaracz: right? And luckily did not cause any horrible accidents. Oh, it did. Well, I mean,
Alison Brown: yeah. I mean, not the permanent, like death, not, not death, but yeah, nobody died, which they could have.
I mean, honestly.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, I, I mean it was just, when you see that over and over that all these athletes are falling and it’s [00:38:00] at the time a sport where you don’t speak up. Right. that was a tough one. That was a really tough one. But of course you got to do wheelchair rugby too, which was awesome.
Alison Brown: The amount of wheelchair rugby I got to watch that story was so much more than I needed to watch for the story. But I said, oh, but it’s for work. I gotta watch this. I gotta watch the whole tournament. I,
so was it the greatest games ever? It’s gotta be in the top five.
Jill Jaracz: Right, right. Because of course now we had the hindsight of 25 more years of games. so after that we have Athens, not a hugely great summer games. Not bad, but I mean, ath, the Athens legacy, I think has really, with all the white elephant venues, has really tarnished the reputation of those games.
But they were also the games that had shot put at Olympia. And that was just a magical [00:39:00] event. So, you know, ups and downs every game says ups and downs. Of course, Chi Beijing 2008 coming out to the world, that incredible bird’s nest venue.
The top 5 Games of our lifetimes
Alison Brown: I’m thinking if I had to make like a top five of the past of my lifetime.
Jill Jaracz: Okay,
Alison Brown: LA 84. Mm. Sydney 2000. Mm-hmm. This is in no particular world. Yeah. Yeah. And this
Jill Jaracz: is summer only?
Alison Brown: This is summer only. London 2012. Mm-hmm. I’m gonna have to put Paris on there just ’cause we were there and it was probably one of the greatest experiences of my life.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. But I also think it was a great
Alison Brown: games. I think it was a great games.
And that’s kind of where I. So I have a top four of the past 50 years.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. I mean, because Montreal was okay, Munich the Legacy. Of course we don’t, yeah. The legacy is bad on Montreal. Munich sadly [00:40:00] has just such a sad legacy and, 80, we don’t know and probably wouldn’t put it at the top
Alison Brown: and soul we did already.
And we saw so many of those stories from Soul that were just heartbreaking.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, Barcelona. Barcelona. I put Barcelona. Barcelona was good games. Okay. I’d put that in my time. Well, you that opening ceremony. Yeah. Well, more than I the others. Oh my gosh. It’s such a good, what a cauldron lighting.
But I think opening ceremonies is a different story because, or cauldron lightings are different story. Yes. ’cause Muhammad Ali is right up there at the top of mind too. Will never not make me cry.
Alison Brown: There you go.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, it is. When you start putting together a top five, you realize, oh, thank goodness there aren’t that many games in our lifetime,
Our historical Games for 2026
Alison Brown: but something that wasn’t in our lifetime.
the games for next year yet. 1956, Corina Jam, Pezo, where they used the full name. It’s not just Corina.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. So, uh, much smaller games, much different [00:41:00] games. And we will be putting together stories from those games.
Alison Brown: So we’ll be starting that
Jill Jaracz: in
Alison Brown: March.
Jill Jaracz: Perhaps. We might do a, we might do a preview of those games in January. Okay. Just because there’s gonna be a lot on, Cortina in 1956. I’m sure it’s gonna get referenced. On the coverage of those games, and hopefully we’ll be able to get to Cortina at some point to see what is left and we’ll get to enjoy.
Curling is in the original stadium, so hopefully that will be going well. Guess
Alison Brown: plug for the fundraiser. Right. And transportation.
Jill Jaracz: Right, right. So yes, if you can help our fundraiser, help us get to Milano Cortina so you can, we can give you the most fun and most realistic coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Please visit flame alive pod.com and look for the millennial Corina fundraiser. And [00:42:00] that is going to do it for this episode, playing this again.
Lorry Luscri: This is Lori. Oak Park Illinois saying Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive.