Cleaver's Games: March 23

The New Zealand press corps is abuzz today with the story that two New Zealanders were reportedly involved in an incident that involved bicycles, heavy drinking and urination.

Speculation is rife about who is involved, what was involved, who will become a pariah. We attended the daily briefings to see if any light would be shed.

Instead we had to sit through 20 minutes of business representatives answering planted questions like: "Will regional Victoria see any business spin-offs from the Games?" "Why, thank you for that question," said business head, "indeed there is..." Yawn.

Finally, the magnificently moustachioed Mark Sainsbury asks Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon about the cycle-drink-wee incident.

Nixon is a formidable looking woman who makes up for in breadth what she lacks in depth.

Appropriately, given the rumoured nature of the incident, she managed to hose it down quite nicely.

* We have entered the period affectionately referred to by reporters as the "home straight".

It's a complicated piece of word play that could only have been thought up by a journalist or someone equally clever like Goethe.

You will spot the athletics reference, the last 100 metres of a race, but if you transpose the words you get "straight home", which is what all of feel like doing as we enter our 16th day offshore. Not that we're ungrateful.

We're just tired of watching our athletes get fourth; tired of listening to how unlucky they were; tired of the haka; tired of hearing reasons why so-and-so can't talk to you; and sick of watching our coins get jammed in one of two washing machines servicing 50 apartments.

Things that wouldn't normally annoy you now begin to take on diplomatic incident status.

Like when in this city of 4,000 restaurants your colleagues insist on eating at the same one two nights in row - a clear breach of tour protocol.

Not only that but Advance Australia Fair has been burned into our cerebellum, permanently etched on to our consciousness, to the point where the line "our land is girt by sea" seems a perfectly normal way of expressing that fact your country is, in fact, a big island.

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READERS VIEWS

In the eyes of Australians, the pallid lustre of New Zealand's paltry medal tally can only be further dimmed by New Zealand athletes urinating on each other.
- Grant