Goldrush Down Under

We’ve come a long way since 776 BC. From the sylvan vale before Mount Olympus to the gadget-filled, domed razzmatazz at Sydney. The ritual of homage to Hellenic deities, born again as a jamboree of peace a century ago, is now a no-quarter-given pursuit of individual and collective sporting excellence. A mock battle of nations. Last Friday, both impulses - the national and the global - got interwoven in a strange, heartwarming spectacle. North and South Korea, here as different Olympic teams, marched under one banner. East Timor, which tasted freedom just last autumn, marked its arrival with a group of athletes. Palestine, yet to be born, too had an independent presence. So had Hong Kong. And, the presence of Bill Gates aside, the opening parade was a tribute to the working class of Australia. The aborigines too came, from beyond the pale, as a multicultural mascot. Cathy Freeman, Australia’s sprint queen, lit the flame. But then, just as Sydney 2000 was declared open amid a riot of colours, a group of aborigines lit another flame outside the stadium in protest. The lesions of two centuries don’t heal in two weeks. Do they?

It is becoming increasingly difficult to dominate the Olympic games. With each successive edition, the number of participating nations is only increasing and the spread of medals goes correspondingly wider. That said, the traditional powerhouses - the US, Germany and Russia - will again take home the largest share of medals from Sydney. To a great extent, it is simply a numbers game. Large populations, allied to established sports programmes and cultures which place a premium on sporting success, almost invariably mean inflated medal counts. Indeed, if US track superstar Marion Jones goes close to her goal of five gold medals, or even five of any colour, she will out-perform most of the countries at the Olympics on her own. Likewise Australia’s Ian Thorpe, who hopes to garner four gold medals in the pool.

How do the little countries compete? Across the board, they don’t. But just as small companies survive in large economic markets by finding their own niche, so do small (perhaps that should be less-developed, rather than small in population terms) countries dominate sub-sections of Olympic sports. Thus the distance runners of Kenya and Morocco will bring gold home to their nations. Nigeria won the soccer gold medal last time and will be one of the favourites again. Bulgaria has a strong tradition in weightlifting. Chinese Taipei has skillful exponents in the new sport of taekwondo.

Buoyed by a home Olympics, the US took 101 medals in Atlanta, no fewer than 44 of them gold. There were 271 medal events then. In Sydney, there will be 300 medal events. Also, women will compete in several disciplines within established sports for the first time. There is the hammer throw and the pole vault in athletics, women’s categories in weightlifting, water polo and modern pentathlon, while sychronised diving for men and women has been added to the aquatics program. On arrival in Sydney at the start of the month, Sydney 2000 US Olympic chef de mission Sandy Baldwin predicted the US tally this time would drop by 10 medals and the Australian tally would rise by about the same number over the 44 medals, seven gold from 1996.

Australia has been working to a long-term plan (originally, and perhaps revealingly, known as the Gold Medal Plan) since just after the Games were awarded to Sydney. The targets set in that plan - 60 medals, 20 gold - roughly correspond to those achieved at the southern hemisphere’s only previous Olympics, Melbourne in 1956. Allowing for the increase in sports, events and participation rates, they are broadly the same.

Sixty medals would see Australia challenge for second place on the unofficial medal table. In Atlanta, Germany came second with 65 medals, while Russia was third with 63 and then China. It is certainly an ambitious target, but Australian Olympic Committee rankings last year showed that the host nation’s athletes would have hit the target based on 1999 performances. China has maintained a steady advance in recent years since returning to the Olympic fold in Los Angeles in 1984. Chinese Olympic Committee chairman Yuan Weimin recently announced a target of at least 16 gold medals in Sydney, but that was before the controversy over omissions from the team after many athletes apparently failed pre-departure doping tests. It remains to be seen what impact the exclusions will have on the rest of the team.

China is both a big power and niche player at the same time, already touted to excel in many of the gymnastic-type sports, plus Asia-dominated disciplines such as badminton. They cut a swathe through the badminton world this year, most recently cleaning up the women’s singles and doubles titles at the Malaysian championships. Coach Li Yongbo hopes for two or three gold medals from his sport, what with a team which boasts of the women’s world champion Gong Zhichao, men’s world champion Sun Yun and the formidable women’s doubles team of Ge Fei and Gu Jun, gold medallists in Atlanta four years ago. The other main badminton contenders in Sydney will be Malaysia, where the game is played with a passion, Indonesia, South Korea, England and Denmark. Diving and synchronised diving, to be contested in Sydney for the first time at an Olympic Games, are the other two Chinese strength, with strong contenders in both its men’s and women’s squads.

Yu Zhoucheng is one of the stars of men’s diving, along with Fernando Platas of Mexico, Germany’s Andreas Wels and Dmitry Sautin of Russia. In the women’s events, China’s Xiaoqiao will be to the fore, as will Yulia Pakhalina of the Ukraine and Myriam Boileau of Canada. Gymnastics, with its mix of team and individual disciplines, will be another strong area for the Chinese. Zhang Jinjing and Li Xiaoshuang are strong contenders in the men’s events, with Russia’s Alexei Bondarenko, Ivan Ivanenka of Belarus and Jesus Carballo of Spain not far behind. Ling Jie and Liu Xuan will head the Chinese challenge in the women’s artistic events, with strong competition coming from Anna Kovalyova and Yekaterina Lobaznyuk of Russia and Lidiya Podkopayeva of the Ukraine, the Atlanta all-around gold medallist.

One sport in which Holland has done historically well is hockey, a game which used to be a preserve of the British Commonwealth nations to a large extent, India and Pakistan in particular dominating the men’s game. Slowly, but surely, it has become more international, with South Korea becoming a power in first women’s and now men’s hockey. Even with the broadening of the competition, it would be something of a surprise if the old four of Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Pakistan did not fight out the men’s semi-finals and thus the medals. Australia has yet to win an Olympic men’s gold medal, often going in as the favourite, or earning that position through the pool matches. Will Sydney be the occasion on which the hoodoo is finally dispelled?

When you think of niches, think of Cuba in boxing and China in women’s weightlifting. The Cubans attack Olympic boxing with a passion. Their most well-known pugilist, Felix Savon, will be trying to match Teofilo Stevenson’s (the great heavyweight of the ‘80s) feat of three consecutive Olympic titles in Sydney. One of his main opponents in the heavyweight division will be Michael Bennett of the US, who defeated the Cuban champion in a controversial decision in last year’s World Championships. This battle may have more spice than even the usual Cuba-US struggle for supremacy.

The gold medals in most of the weight categories is likely to come down to a straight-out battle between the US and Cuba. Women’s weightlifting is a Chinese stronghold. Since the inception of the women’s world championships in 1987, China has won no fewer than 240 of the 318 gold medals up for grabs. The only limiting factor to Chinese dominance in Sydney is likely to be the fact that only four women per country can be entered across the categories.

The sport of taekwondo, which makes its debut in Sydney, could provide Chinese Taipei with its best shot at Olympic glory. Huang Chih-hsiung of Chinese Taipei was only 10 when his father made him take up taekwondo to prevent other children from bullying him. Now 23, Huang’s prowess in the Korean martial art sport could bring him gold and glory in the men’s taekwondo flyweight division - and a handsome cash prize from his government. Although it is South Korea’s national sport, they are not fielding any athletes in the men’s flyweight division, boosting Huang’s chances of walking away with the gold. Chinese Taipei has never won a gold in an official Olympic event since first competing in the Summer Games in Los Angeles in 1932.

It doesn’t matter who of the four taekwondo athletes wins the gold. But we must win a gold," head coach Sung Ching-hung said recently. A gold would be worth T$10 million (US$330,000) tax free for Huang and a similar amount for his three coaches. He would take home T$6 million if he bagged the silver and T$4 million if it’s the bronze. Even if he finished 10th, he would still pocket T$100,000.

And then there is the powerhouse called Russia. Things have changed a lot ever since the old Soviet Union days, but it still carries lot of weight in Olympics. Although hampered by a chronic shortage of cash, it is aiming for the country’s biggest haul of Olympic medals since the Soviet days. "I think we are capable of winning between 35 and 37 gold medals," said Anatoly Kolesov, head of Russia’s Olympic preparations for the Sydney Games, recently. With names like Alexander Popov and Alexander Karelin, Svetlana Khorkina and Svetlana Masterkova in their 500-strong Olympic squad, the Russians might live up to the hopes of the world’s largest country, whose sporting prowess is the reminder of its superpower days. But they’ll need some great performances to improve on the 26 gold medals they had won four years ago in Atlanta, a distant second to the host nation.

Popov, who turns 29 in November, leads the resurgent swimming team in Sydney, where he will try to become the first male swimmer to win an event at three consecutive Olympic Games. This year, he has showed his younger rivals he is back to the form which helped him to claim both the 50 and 100 m freestyle in the ‘92 and ‘96 Games. He smashed a 10-year-old world record in the 50 m at the Russian National Championships in June, and went on to win four golds at the European Championships in Helsinki two weeks later.

The Russians also pin medal hopes on the new wave of talented swimmers like Dmitry Kamornikov and Anatoly Polyakov. Kamornikov, who turned 19 a month ago, won the European 200 metres breaststroke title in an impressive fashion while Polyakov, 20, took over from 1996 Olympic champion Denis Pankratov as Russia’s new butterfly king after claiming the European 200 m crown.

But for all the appeal of other sports, it is still in the main stadium and the pool that the most widely-watched battles will take place. Russia will need a resurgence to match it with the US and Australia in the pool. US team head Sandy Baldwin predicts a head-to-head battle with the home team in swimming.

"I think the swimming, especially between the United States and Australia, will be one of the highlights of the Games," Baldwin said on her arrival. "It is an Olympic sport so it is very important for the Americans, and of course, the Australians love swimming," she said. The competition is expected to be much closer than what it was four years ago when the US won 13 golds, including all of the relays, while Australia won just two golds.

Australians now have the top times in six of the 26 individual events to be contested, with everybody looking up to 17-year-old Ian Thorpe and his team-mates Susie O’Neill, Grant Hackett and Michael Klim, all world champions. Thorpe is expected to easily win the men’s 400 m freestyle, the 200 m freestyle, plus take a gold as part of the 4x200 m freestyle relay. The US record of winning all the men’s 4x100 m freestyle relays, since the race became an Olympic event in 1964, is in danger of being broken by Australia. Other swimmers, like Popov

of Russia, the gold medallist in Atlanta in both the men’s 50 and 100 m freestyle races, and Dutch freestyle and butterfly sprinter Inge de Bruijn, should break up the Australian-US fight.

If swimming is far more international than most other sports, track and field goes up to another level again. Around 30 countries win a medal of some colour at swimming world championships. In athletics, it is close to double that number. Expect the same sort of internationalism again in Sydney. The US will start favourites in events like both the 100 metres sprints, where Maurice Greene and Marion Jones, Michael Johnson and Inger Miller should rule the roost. Elsewhere, however, it is all wide open. The men’s 800 m sees contenders from Denmark (OK, Wilson Kipketer is Kenyan-born), Switzerland, Algeria, Russia and Kenya. Moroccans will come to the fore in the longer track events, as will the Kenyans again. In field events, the great European champions such as Sergei Bubka of the Ukraine (pole vault), Tomas Dvorak of the Czech Republic (decathlon), Stacy Dragila of the USA (pole vault), Trine Hattestad of Norway (javelin) and Mihaele Melinte of Romania (hammer throw) come to the fore. In Atlanta, there were medallists from Namibia (Frank Fredericks, 100 and 200 m), Uganda (Davis Kamoga 400 m), Burundi (Venuste Niyongabo, 5,000 m), Ecuador (Jefferson Perez, 50 km walk), Mozambique (Maria Mutola, 800 m), Slovenia (Brigita Bukovec, 100 m hurdles), Syria (Ghada Shouaa, heptatlon) and the Bahamas (4x100 m relay).

Expect the same sort of smorgasbord again. At the track, the unpredictable is the only thing that is predictable.