AustLit

The Sydney 2000 Olympic Games were seen by authorities, such as the Australian Olympic Committee and the Australian Government, as the nation’s opportunity to again define itself to the world (Gordon). They aimed to present an image of Australia that would encourage wider tourism, inspire patriotism in Australian citizens, and do justice to the history of the nation in order to move towards reconciliation with the Indigenous community (Housel).

These aspirations become clear upon viewing the Opening Ceremony of the Games, directed by Ric Birch and the Sydney Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (SOCOG). Cathy Freeman, chosen to light the cauldron at the Opening, became a crucial figure in Sydney Games as a national symbol of the desire for reconciliation between Indigenous and white Australia (Bruce and Wensing).

After the Sydney Olympic Games, Australia was seen as a respected and successful player on the world stage, which encouraged tourism and resulted in even more kudos for the Australian Olympic Team at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Here they achieved their highest gold medal tally to date (“Inspiration of Our Nation”). The outcome was not quite as good at the subsequent Beijing Olympics in 2008, but perhaps this was to be expected as Australia was already punching well above its weight in this arena.

Racial representations of one kind or another have been impossible to avoid in the more recent period of the Australian Olympic journey.

In 1993, the Sydney Organizing Committee won their bid to host the Sydney Olympic Games by presenting the location as a “multicultural city, in a multicultural country, to host a multicultural event” (White 1449). From this initial proposal, it became crucial that a central focus of the Sydney Games should be the honouring of Australia’s traditional heritage, along with an attempt to heal the issues between Aboriginal and white Australians (SOCOG). Momentum for such reconciliation grew in the decade before Sydney 2000, with the founding of National Reconciliation Week in 1996, The Bringing Them Home Report in 1997, and National Sorry Day in 1998. The Rudd Government’s landmark Apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples came a decade later on 13th February 2008 (Australian Government, “Apology”). (See featured work Rabbit Proof Fence for a representation of 'The Stolen Generation'.)

The 2000 Sydney Olympics was the year that female athletes truly shone. The number of sports available to them rose to 25 out of 28 games, compared with 21 at Atlanta in 1996. The number of female participants went up from 34% to 38% (Payne). In 2011 Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed females only lagged 2% behind males in general sporting participation at 64%, up 3% from 2006. A 2004 study into media coverage found that News Online, part of Australia’s public broadcaster the ABC, had equal coverage of both male and female athletes in terms of the number of words written about them (Payne).

However, other studies covering sporting journalism have shown that female athletes are often stereotyped in pictorial coverage (Jones, D.). A frequent complaint from Australian and international authors has been that the Australian media portrays female athletes and sport as an inferior to men’s. In qualitative and quantitative analyses on both men and women’s sports coverage, it was found that, in many cases, the representation of female athletes was problematic. Positive language that emphasised strength was applied to men more than women, suggesting that females were inferior in some way (Payne).

In some respects, these depictions have not changed since the early feminine-slanted representations of Fanny Durack, and male-orientated Olympic posters. However, the balance of male/female/androgenous representation in Sydney posters was much more even than in earlier years. Similarly, the praise that Cathy Freeman received from the media in the 2000 leaves a place to wonder whether she would have received the same treatment as Mina Wylie had she not won any medals, or the same recognition as an Indigenous Australian if the Games had not been held in Australia.

The SOCOG were in charge of the design and execution of the Olympic Games in 2000. After the discovery of extensive corruption in the IOC in 1998 (Jones, T.), SOCOG hoped to make the Sydney Games enough of a spectacle to eclipse the negative perspectives created by the scandal (SOCOG). The television satire series The Games (1998-2000) echoed the disillusionment expressed by the general press with the IOC at this time (Jones, T.). This was followed by the release of the feature film Lies, Spies and Olympics in 1999, which revisited allegations of wrongdoing in the organisation of the 1956 Melbourne Games. SOCOG, however, were largely successful with their aims, and the 2000 Games became known as the gold standard, “a benchmark for the spirit of the Games” (“Sydney 2000”).

Next Section: Conclusion