Tourism, the biggest winner

SYDNEY, SEPT. 28. Tourism is a big winner of the Sydney Olympics, Australia's tourist chief said on Thursday, predicting an extra 1.6 million visitors in the decade straddling the 2000 Games.

The additional arrivals, lured by blanket media coverage and advertising by Games sponsors, would bring $880 million in revenues to a tourist industry that accounts for 10 per cent of Australia's economy, John Morse said.

``It's been way, way beyond our expectations,'' the managing director of the Australian Tourist Commission told a news conference. ``Sydney and Australia are the stars of the Games, but the big winner is tourism.''

Sydney shopkeepers, hoteliers and restaurateurs are grumbling that the Games have failed to deliver the expected bonanza. But Morse said expectations of a retail windfall during the Games itself had been overblown, even though the sporting extravaganza has attracted 110,000 international visitors likely to spend a $500 million.

The real benefits would appear from November and December during the Australian summer, he said. Next year, Australia hoped for a record five million visitors, up 10 per cent from this year.

And the commercial glow from the Games would last for a decade from 1997 to 2004. Morse said the Games had presented a new image of Australia, focusing on culture, food and wine and lifestyle, that had reached countries - including France and Italy - where down under traditionally has been off the map.

Great idea that Winged in

John Ian Wing, who changed the face of the Olympics with a simple letter to the organisers, is at last getting to see the greatest sports show on earth.

In 1956, the world faced international tension with the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the Suez crisis. The cold war was at its height.

Wing wanted to change the world with a symbolic gesture that showed how sport could rise above politics.

He was working as a 17-year-old apprentice carpenter in Melbourne's Chinatown when the idea came to him. Wing wrote to Wilfred Kent Hughes, chairman of the organising committee for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, suggesting that the athletes should all march together in the closing ceremony. They had always paraded as separate nations before. The organisers took up the suggestion, the athletes all strolled in together and Melbourne was forever dubbed the friendly Games.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Sport
Previous : Gaze shoots Australia into semifinals
Next     : For Edwards, heart is where his home is