Bill Bryson's Games: The best things in life are free - except in Sydney

By BILL BRYSON

Before this Olympics, the biggest public event I had ever been to was in 1990, when some dear people at the Sunday Correspondent, a now defunct London newspaper, sent me to the American Super Bowl football championships in New Orleans.

There I discovered what an exceptionally congenial life you get to lead if you are a credentialled journalist attending a large, well-sponsored event.

Upon checking in at the press headquarters I was presented with a stylish canvas bag full of small presents - notebooks, pens, commemorative pins and the like - and an envelope packed with invitations to dinners, lunches, breakfasts, brunches, product launches and cocktail receptions hosted by the various commercial patrons.

I would hate you to think that I am so shallow that an assortment of large corporations can buy my goodwill with several cocktails, a lavish buffet and a press kit containing assorted nifty keepsakes because they most certainly can't. However, I do very much appreciate it when they try.

The upshot is that by diligently attending every function on offer I ended up with enough pins, pens, notebooks, binders, canvas bags and other mementos to keep me in Christmas presents for (so far) 10 years.

Naturally, I assumed that Sydney would be much the same, but alas such largesse appears not to be on offer here.

I must say I was a little surprised because it seemed to me that if there is anybody who understands the pleasure and appeal of unearned gifts, it is the organisers of the Sydney Games. But in fact this has been a pretty thin event freebiewise.

Happily, I haven't gone entirely without.

In common with the 110,000 other people at the opening ceremonies, I did get a nice Globite case containing an odd but interesting assortment of trinkets - a commemorative pin, a pair of socks, some stickers, a plastic torch with which to annoy people in adjoining seats - and the Sydney Morning Herald graciously gave me (possibly in lieu of money) several articles of clothing bearing the company's logo: a polo shirt, rugby shirt, baseball cap and nylon rainjacket, all of which naturally I wear with pride day and night. So I have not gone entirely without.

But it occurred to me that I had nothing to take back to America with me in the way of real Olympics souvenirs. Then I read an article in the Money section of the Sydney Morning Herald telling you how to make a killing by buying the right Olympic memorabilia.

Essentially, the trick seems to be to buy something, wait for a century or so and then cash in.

If, for instance, you had bought a poster called Jeux Olympiques a Athens for half a drachma in 1896, and looked after both it and yourself, you would find it now worth $1,450 Australian (almost $US25).

So motivated by both a healthy lust for profit and an earnest desire to take away some worthwhile memento of this greatest of all antipodean gatherings, I took to the streets of Sydney to shop.

Well, goodness me what a lot of stuff there is out there. There isn't a thing you can't get.

Name me any item at all - be as preposterous as you want - and I can guarantee that somewhere in Sydney it is on sale with Olympic rings on it, at a price roughly double what you would consider outrageous.

I saw tea towels, bath towels, shirts, umbrellas, cargo pants, baseball caps, yachting caps, bath mats, boxer shorts, jerseys, sweatshirts, T-shirts, fleeces, soccer balls and basketballs, Driza-Bone coats, and much, much more, all with "Sydney 2000" proudly emblazoned on them somewhere.

I wanted something a bit unusual, and in a novelty cake shop called Sweet Art in Paddington I believed I had found it.

It was a cake in the shape of the head of Juan Antonio Samaranch - surely the first time in many years that he has looked good enough to eat - against a backdrop of Olympic rings and with a small shark in the foreground leaping from the water as if about to go for his jugular.

Alas the cake, I was informed when I stepped in to make inquiries, was neither for sale nor actually a cake.

"It's Styrofoam," explained the shop assistant. "So we can use it again," she explained further.

I said nothing, though the thought did flit through my mind that the day when there will be a fresh need for a Juan Antonio Samaranch cake to promote an Olympic Games in Sydney may actually never come. "So how much would it be if it were a cake and it were for sale?" I asked.

"Eight hundred dollars. Maybe nine."

We agreed that this was quite a lot, even for a once-in-a-lifetime occasion, and parted on good terms.

In the end, like nearly every other visitor to the city, I ended up in the Olympic Store on Pitt Street.

When I was here in July they could hardly give the stuff away, but now - goodness! Outside, 60 or 70 people were patiently waiting to be admitted, a few at a time.

Inside, a capacity crowd of 800 thronged the aisles, buying everything they could lay their hands on.

I was particularly taken with the Dawn Fraser and Murray Rose DNA sets. These are a set of commemorative pins, each containing a genuine particle of Ms Fraser's or Mr Rose's DNA, priced respectively at $160 and $200.

The young man behind the counter wasn't sure how they got the DNA out of the Olympic stars, though he was pretty certain they hadn't had to be strapped down or anything. Nor could he tell me why Mr Rose's DNA was $40 dearer than Ms Fraser's.

In either case, this was more than I was prepared to pay, though I conceded that it is not every day you can purchase the necessary materials with which to clone your own Olympic champions.

"Have you sold many of these?" I asked.

"We've sold lots of everything," the young man said, looking frazzled. "We can hardly keep most of this stuff in stock."

The only part of the store that wasn't terribly busy was the mascots section. I don't know why, but every Olympics these days has a mascot. Moscow had a bear called Mischa. Nagano had some cute snowflake creatures. Atlanta, I believe, had a person being shot on a street corner. And now Sydney has Millie, Sod and Oily, or whatever they are called. In any case, they have been a bit of a flop, which is not altogether surprising because they are very, very naff and anyway mascots always are a flop because they always are very, very naff. (I've just remembered that the Atlanta mascot was called "Izzy", as in "Izzy still breathing? Izzy dead yet? Izzy got any money on him?")

Anyway, that's why I bought one each of the Sydney mascots. Rarity value, you see. For decades to come, every house will have an Olympic plate on the mantel and a commemorative cup sitting proudly on a shelf. But I alone will have the mascots.

You may think I'm a sucker, but believe me, a hundred years from now when it comes time to cash in, I'll be laughing.

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