Sydney - the city of smiles

By GREG ANSLEY

The carload of Sydneysiders beamed from ear to ear as a radio announcer read from start to finish a eulogy of their city written first for the mass-circulation American magazine Sports Illustrated, then posted on the CNN website.

But there was an uncomfortable shifting in seats as the author advocated dumping Athens and keeping Sydney as host city for the 2004 Games, and 2008, and preferably until the year 3000.

Once is fine, but another Olympics ... ?

At least not until the nation has had the equivalent of a good night's sleep, and time to recover from what is already a giddily exciting but exhausting party that has launched Sydney and Australia on the global map as mature, fun and thoroughly capable.

Australia's own sense of relief, halfway through the Games, has come partly from the realisation that, to its own surprise and despite scandal and technical gremlins, it could stage such a huge event.

It has been reinforced by the great cynics of the international media: Americans rubbing Atlanta's face in Sydney's competence, Europeans bowled over by the efficiency cloaked in Australia's carefully nurtured G'day culture, even Brits who traditionally prefer scalpels to pens when writing about the Aussies.

Even the weather, notoriously fickle in September, appears to have been scripted.

From the day of the opening, forecasters warned of weak fronts bearing rain. None has yet arrived, apart from a few sprinkles as morning fog began lifting early on Thursday.

"I don't believe it," said Sydneysider Gary Sandilands. "I've never seen a September like this."

Yesterday Sydney woke with trepidation, fearing that the purring machine that has kept both city and Games running would collapse under the weight of what organisers were calling Super Friday, when the finals of the swimming washed across the start of the athletics.

Spectators were warned to start travelling by 6 am, up to five hours ahead of the first events, to make sure the flow ran at the rate of 40,000 people an hour on the city's overworked train system.

Memories of the accidents, derailments and breakdowns that plagued the system in the run-up to the Games were fresh in organisers' minds, but yesterday it performed almost flawlessly.

Crowds at the Olympic park reached 40,000 by 8 am, 100,000 by 9 am and 175,000 by 11 am, with the total expected to peak at 400,000.

Keeping everything together - for the first week at least - is the result of a massive national effort, centred on Sydney but backed heavily by federal agencies and spinning off through training facilities and extra staff and resources to states as distant as Western Australia.

In addition to direct funding of more than $A450 million, Canberra launched Olympic programmes in agencies ranging from arts, business and postal bureaucracies to defence, aviation, customs and immigration.

At Sydney airport, streamlined procedures pumped an extra 34,000 people through immigration barriers in the fortnight before the Games.

In the city, control of the Games outside the arenas is split between two bodies, one looking after and coordinating the venues and another pulling together the transport system in an infinitely complex web of buses, trains and roads.

Even in the peaks, the system works, if more slowly and with the expected discomfort of shoulder-to-shoulder crowding spiced with the danger of losing an eye to the miniature flagpoles protruding from backpacks.

And as crowds swelled in city hotspots such as Darling Harbour and Circular Quay, so did the rubbish.

The city's battalion of cleaners has doubled to 400, fanning out in an endless cycle of emptying and replacing bins and bags and collecting more than 100 tonnes of rubbish since the opening ceremony.

Sydney has also been kept working by a vast communications system, based around Telstra's Millennium network, nine years in the making and running through 4800km of optical fibre between Olympic venues and the international broadcasting centre at Homebush Bay.

It is the biggest telecommunications network built for a single event, beaming the Games out to 3.5 billion people around the world, and supporting the highest-density phone mobile network ever developed and huge amounts of traffic on Olympic websites.

The technology is also in evidence at the six live sites around the city, where massive screens relay live coverage of the Games to crowds that at major events have swollen to more than 100,000, staying on to party late into the night to free concerts.

There is a real warmth to the city, beyond the balmy days.

Traffic has ebbed to a relative trickle - official estimates say by 25 per cent, but it seems much more - with many commuters leaving their cars at home and thousands more taking advantage of extended school holidays to flee the city.

It is hard to be glum when you can zip into town in half the time and with no hassle.

The central business district throbs with people, especially around live sites where performances continue throughout the day, but there is a relaxed, holiday feel to the city.

Many businesses have helped their suit-clad staff to feel it too: mufti days, normally restricted to Fridays, have for many been extended for the duration of the Games.

With some notable exceptions - Colombian pickpockets who stole $A100,000 before they were caught, for example, and bogus Saudi princes who took almost $A1 million in diamonds from city traders - crime has fallen dramatically.

But apart from fast-food outlets, Olympic pin traders, souvenir shops and sellers of Olympic wares and vibrant Australiana, business has not been so hot.

Taxi driver Leon Vitivek complains that trade has fallen off. So do restaurateurs, who expected a bonanza that has yet to appear.

Bill Healey, executive director of the Retailers Association says they should not complain.

They were warned in advance that, except for prime tourist and Games venues, business would slump as people left town, went on holiday, stayed home to watch television or worked from home, which as many as one in 10 employees are estimated to have done.

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