Olympic storm in a teacup over late bus driver

By SELWYN PARKER

It could not have been a worse start for the management team of the Sydney Olympics. There's Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, and a few of his considerable entourage fuming outside their hotel because their official bus driver went to the wrong Jones St.

But instead of digging into their pockets and hailing a couple of cabs to make their appointment a few minutes late, or even walking - after all, it was not too far to the party's destination at the ABCs studios - what does Mr Samaranch do?

He gets one of his aides to cancel the appointment, storms back into the hotel in a tizz, and proceeds to criticise the transport arrangements for the 2000 Olympics. Come on!

But the damage was done. The Games haven't even started and here's a PR disaster that illustrates the special difficulties of organising the world's biggest exercise in tourism. In management terms the Olympics are a bit like hosting an Army, except that soldiers are much easier to please.

However, back to the missing bus.

As Olympics Minister Michael Knight told me in an interview in Sydney this year, transport was always going to be the Games' big headache.

But never in his worst nightmare could he have envisaged the IOC president being left on a street corner because his driver went to the cheap, greyhound park end of Jones St instead of the dignified end.

However, the pragmatic Mr Knight may take comfort in his guiding maxim for these Games.

As he observed philosophically, "There's never been a battle plan that has survived engagement with the enemy."

The Games managers had even established a special troubleshooting body to move people around - the Olympic Road and Transport Authority - so this sort of thing would not happen. "If you want a problem solved in the Olympics, make sure you give power with the authority," explained Mr Knight.

The bedrock principle behind running these particular Games is that management, and not the city, takes responsibility for everything that happens "outside the fence" (the Olympic venues) which might disrupt them. In the main, that's garbage disposal, traffic control, transport, entertainment and security.

In Atlanta in 1996, the organising committee disastrously left everything outside the fence to the city authorities.

But your sympathies have to be with managers wrestling with an impossible job. Never mind who goes faster, higher or stronger, the Olympics are really about trying to give a million or so visitors a good time in difficult circumstances so they will go home and tell their friends Australia is a great place.

If the Games were just about organising athletes and competitions, they would be a doddle because it is the international sporting authorities like Fina, the swimming body, which run just about everything inside the venues.

But if it all goes reasonably right on the next 19 nights, the Olympics can be turned into "the most amazing tourism showcase imaginable," as the minister says.

The returns, however, are down the track.

While Barcelona, host city in 1992, had a good Olympic year for tourism, it has been better every year since.

Between 1994 and the latest available figures of 1998, overnight stays in the Catalan capital jumped from 4.7 million to 7.4 million and weekend stays from 11.1 million to 20.2 million. The hotel industry boomed, with occupancy rising by about a third. Numbers of overseas visitors passing through the airport went from 4.2 million in 1994 to 7.3 million in 1998. Conference business took off.

That's what the Olympic managers are banking on - a terrific decade of tourism from which New Zealand will also profit.

But first they have to keep all those visitors happy, a feat that deserves its own gold medal.

Selwyn Parker is available at wordz@xtra.co.nz