Georgia Still on Knight’s Mind

Atlanta, 1995. The Olympic Games are a year away. But Michael Knight already can see that these Games will be remembered for how not to get things done.

An example: Tickets to modern pentathlon are cheap. That makes pentathlon, with five events spread across a number of venues, a hot ticket to the Olympic experience.

Knight recalls being told a year in advance by a senior Atlanta organizer, “Michael, we’ll be doing well to get the athletes to the five events. There is absolutely no chance the spectators will get to all five.”

Knight, the Australian minister in charge of putting on the Sydney Olympics, a politician who loves a good story, paused. Then he said, laughing, “Given that the real purpose of seeing the modern pentathlon is to see the five events, the fact that they were ‘fessing up a year before the Games that their transport arrangements meant that you couldn’t--that was not a good sign.”

Knight can afford to laugh now. The Sydney Games have yet to go off--they begin Sept. 15, 83 days from today. And, as he is quick to note, “Atlanta certainly has run a better Games than we’ve run so far.”

But, in an exclusive interview with The Times, he also said that Sydney organizers have taken note of what went wrong in Atlanta, have applied common-sense business principles to the mundane yet essential tasks of managing the Games--and fully expect to deliver an Olympics that works.

In large measure, the best any organizing committee can hope for during the 17 days of the Summer Games is to be like an umpire at a World Series game--essential yet unnoticed.

That wasn’t the case in Atlanta, where organizers drew criticism that still clouds memories of those Games:

* There weren’t enough buses. And some drivers didn’t know where they were going.

* The computerized system designed to deliver results was balky.

* And, of course, a bomb went off at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, killing one woman and injuring 100 others. Survivalist Eric Rudolph, charged in the attack, remains a fugitive.

Terrorism, of course, remains a worry at any Games, and no security plan can deliver a guarantee. But the approach Down Under illustrates the key difference between the American way four years ago and the Australian approach now.

In the United States, local, state and federal law enforcement agencies readied for the Atlanta Games. In New South Wales, the Australian state in which Sydney is located, there’s one primary agency, the New South Wales police.

Nearly from the get-go, the idea in Sydney has been to operate with such clearly defined lines of authority.

At the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, for instance, Knight is indisputably in charge--giving the Games the sort of leading personality that, as Peter Ueberroth proved in Los Angeles in 1984, can be critical to success.

A key difference: Knight is a government minister with political capital so solid he has earned the Games repeated access to public funds. A few days ago, the New South Wales state government announced its third infusion in four months for SOCOG, this time about $85 million. The cost of staging the Games is now estimated at $1.5 billion.

Knight makes no apologies for the infusions. His job, he said, is to identify potential problems, hand them off to experts, get them the money they need--and get out of the way.

“If you want a problem solved, you should give ownership of the problem to people with the capacity to solve it,” said Knight, who stopped in California on Thursday to meet with The Times en route from Sydney to New York.

Take transit, for instance, which Knight calls “the biggest problem any Olympic city faces.”

He also said, “No Olympic city ever gets it 100% right. Because if you’ve got a transport system that will cope with the Olympic load, then you’ve got a transport system that is massively over-designed for the rest of the year, rest of the decade, and you’ve wasted millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, of dollars. So how can you get it as right as possible?”

In Sydney, the approach has been to turn it over to a special governmental agency, the Olympic Roads and Transport Authority. ORTA ultimately reports to Knight. But it also was given exceptionally wide legal authority to coordinate all ground transport--buses, cars, trains--and keep things moving. Its power is so wide it borders on authoritarian:

Close down a particular road? ORTA can do it.

Impose Olympics-only lanes? ORTA can do it.

Ban private cars from all Olympic sites? Already done.

ORTA has such power that already a common commuting refrain in Sydney goes, “You ORTA do what they tell you to do.”

A series of events at Olympic Park, west of downtown Sydney, has been built into the pre-Games schedule to test ORTA.

In 1998, for instance, ORTA moved more than 1 million people over two weeks to a new show grounds at Olympic Park for the annual Easter livestock show.

Last year, the park put on both the livestock show and, during a busy night at the show, a concert at Stadium Australia by that enduring 1970s group, the Bee Gees, that drew 63,000,

This year, Knight said, ORTA drew simultaneous events at the show, at the stadium and at the aquatics center, site of the Olympic pool.

“We know the Olympic load will be bigger,” Knight said. “But each year we’ve tried to [raise] the bar.”

Meantime, the call went out long ago for more than 3,300 buses from all around Australia--and at least double that number of drivers.

Drivers from Australia’s outback, being trained now, won’t be asked to suddenly become city slickers with responsibility for key routes, he said.

“If you’ve got a bus driver from the country who’s coming into Sydney, you don’t ask them to drive U.S. athletes to three or four different training locations,” Knight said.

That driver, he said, drives the shuttle from the media village to the media center and back again, or something similarly simple.

“In terms of transport, I’m comfortable we’ve done the best training and preparation we could to succeed at it,” Knight said.

In terms of technology, Knight said he fully expects IBM--which also was responsible for the results system in Atlanta--to get it right this time around.

Why? Because, he said, IBM now owns the problem.

SOCOG signed a contract with IBM, Knight said, that calls for organizers to pay IBM “tens of millions of dollars.” In exchange, SOCOG explicitly allocated results responsibility, “end to end,” to IBM.

Shortly after the Sydney Games, IBM will cease being one of the leading corporate sponsors of the International Olympic Committee. Skeptics have suggested that as a result IBM will be indifferent to its performance in Sydney.

In a May 3 letter to the IOC, however, an IBM vice president said the company has a “very aggressive plan” to ensure its systems work in Sydney, adding, “We are successfully executing that plan.”

IBM, Knight said, is “very conscious of the bad publicity they got out of Atlanta and they would argue, with some justification, that they were disproportionately blamed. In Sydney, they’re very keen to be seen to redeem themselves. And given the nature of the contract, they know there’s nowhere for them to hide.”

Finally, Knight said, he has absolutely no doubt that Sydney will out-do Atlanta in one regard--the staging of the Paralympic Games, which begin a couple of weeks after the Summer Games end.

“I’m always careful about criticizing Atlanta,” he said, but he was “very saddened” by the Paralympic Games there, which he called “underfunded” and “poorly supported.”

Knight said he recalls watching wheelchair athletes waiting in long lines in the hot Georgia sun to get into a dining hall--and, inside, lesser-quality food than that served to Olympians. Worse, he said, many could not successfully navigate over an uneven temporary floor without spilling their trays.

Moreover, he said, the stadium hadn’t been properly cleaned before being turned over to the Paralympians, and some equipment already had been taken out.

In Sydney, Knight said, the Paralympians will use the Olympic venues, stay in the Olympic village, use the Olympic dining rooms and be served by the same caterer feeding the Olympic athletes.

“We want to see the Paralympians get treated as well as the Olympians,” Knight said, adding his one and only guarantee: “You can be sure that will happen.”

INSIDE

“Jaws”

Breaker

Australian official says a shark attack during the triathlon is highly unlikely. Page 8

Gaining

a Foothold

Texas’ Laura Wilkinson is in first place heading into 10-meter U.S. diving finals. Page 9