Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  The outfit running the Sydney Olympics is called SOCOG, pursuant to the standard Australian journalistic delusion that acronyms make prose easier to read. SOCOG’s initial issue of tickets was a SNAFU, and it was assumed from then on that All Fucked Up would be Situation Normal. The organizers have hence had to operate in a media climate by which everything they do right is their merest duty, while everything they do wrong is a calamity hindering Australia from its rightful place among mature nations. There were also suggestions that Aboriginal leaders might, or even should, bring the whole thing to a halt with flaming spears, if an overdose of performance-enhancing drugs had not already propelled a majority of the world’s athletes raving into Sydney harbour to drown bloodily among man-eating sharks trained on a diet of triathletes. No worries? Nothing but.

  But at Rossini’s I concluded that the press, at the eleventh hour, had caught up with the crowds around me. In both senses of the last word, ‘She’ll be right, sport’ was the phrase that fitted. Hard-bitten journos had put off the burden of Australia’s global destiny and begun to exult. Some of the exultation might be as debilitating as the previous angst. Legitimate national pride is easily infected by nationalist fervour, especially when it comes to medal prospects. Australia has always punched a ton above its weight in that department, but success can breed hubris. With feet longer than my legs and the facial profile of a racing yacht’s keel turned on end, Ian Thorpe is a mighty swimmer, but the expectations heaped upon him could add up to a haversack full of lead. Cathy Freeman has been hiding out all year from a double pressure: some of the Aboriginal activists didn’t want her to run at all (conniving at the fake prestige of racist Australia, etc.), while many who wish her well imbue her inevitable victory with a mountain of symbolic significance (incarnating the multicultural unity of mature Australia, etc.). There is much less press about her French rival Marie-José Pérec, who is not only physically bigger but on several occasions, notably the last Olympics in Atlanta, has run faster. If Cathy comes second, the press who have badgered her will bear a heavy responsibility, but you can bet that most of it will be transferred to her.

  Still, you can’t blame the media for being fascinated; and stuff about national prestige was nothing but true when it came to the torch relay, which had been a triumph, an example to the watching world, and huge fun. The thing had fulminated its way all over Australia by now. It had been carried by celebrities, poets, artists, palsied kids who had to be carried themselves, and representatives of every known ethnic group including, bizarrely, Crown Prince Albert of Monaco. That night it was due to be carried past Circular Quay, where the crowds would be colossal. There was small chance of seeing anything at ground level. Spotting the Paragon hotel, a classic two-storey sandstone edifice that was already old when I waddled past it as a tot on the great day my mother took me on the ferry to the zoo, I made my plans. That second storey was the secret.

  That night I was in an upstairs pub room looking down into the tumultuous crowd. What I had failed to calculate was that part of the tumultuous crowd would be in the room with me. The joint was jumping with the young and beautiful. Jammed between two scintillating lovelies called Claire and Polly, each of whom had at least four boyfriends standing behind us, I had an upper circle seat for the triumphal march from Aida revamped as a musical comedy. The progress of the torch in our direction was visible in detail on a giant television screen hanging from the Cahill expressway on the far side of the plaza. The screen relayed images from cameras all over the sky. Media helicopters thwacked overhead, weaving to avoid a giant dirigible marked ‘G’DAY’. As they dodged the diridge, they were getting pictures of heaven on earth. At the Opera House Olivia Newton-John, radiant in her flour-bag jogging whites, passed the torch to the even lovelier Pat Rafter, his darling knees dimpling in the photo-flash. While the boyfriends blew satirical raspberries, piercingly audible even through the uproar, Claire and Polly passed out screaming. They screamed ‘Nice pants!’ and ‘Call it off, we’ve had enough!’ Shouting was the only way to communicate basic information. At that moment the Olympic rings lit up on the bridge and fireworks erupted from the pylons at each end. One of the boyfriends, a pug-faced wag called Nugget, yelled ‘And we live here!’

  It was the right thing to yell. The bunch around me were all in the professions: architecture, law, finance. They had all been at university together. When they were born, the Melbourne Olympics were already more than twenty years ago. This was their time, their city and, I had to admit, their country. Their combination of boundless energy, unbridled humour and fundamental gentleness would be the best guarantee for preserving the future that was already here. As the torch went by, they assured me it was a fake and made sure I noted that down. They were referring to the hallowed tradition by which a hoax torch always precedes the real one. It first happened when the torch went through Sydney on its way to Melbourne in 1956. The Lord Mayor of Sydney was presented with a flaming plum-pudding tin on a stick, fell for it, and launched into his official spiel. In the laughter that followed him for the rest of his life, his only consolation was that nobody ever did that to Hitler.

  The big day dawned cool and cloudy. Out at Homebush Bay the Olympic stadia still looked good under a darker sky as the itinerant population roamed, schmoozed, kibitzed and rehearsed. The great thing, for which the officials have received insufficient credit, is that it all got built in good time. The main stadium’s 1,500 eco-friendly dunnies have thrilled the nation. Earlier in the year I had flown in to host a black-tie fundraiser for the Australian Olympic team and had been massively impressed. But did I really want to watch the opening ceremony from a box full of blasé journos sneaking sideways looks at the size of each other’s modems? Or did I want to watch it in the city, surrounded by the best party on the planet? It was no contest. The real story was in the streets. My Croatian cab driver found the Harbour Bridge at only his second try.

  Watching the show on the giant screens in the city there must have been a million people. A lot of them were at Circular Quay and in Martin Place, my two choices of al fresco venue. To get a view I had to play the wrinkly line for all it was worth. By a long mile it was the best show of its kind I have ever seen, perhaps the first great choreographic work of the new century. To know the whole world would see it brought tears of pride to my tiny eyes. It was a triumph for its impresario, Ric Birch. At the handover in Atlanta, he sent in a team of bike-riding inflatable kangaroos and earned an undeserved reputation for naffness with the Australian media, worried that he might have damaged our rating as an incipient mature nation. But with this effort he proved himself the Diaghilev of the Southern hemisphere. The aerial reef ballet staged in imaginary water was a miracle. My favourite bit was the fluttering swarm of jellyfish. The whole lyrical synthesis of the Aboriginal dreamtime and the modern age was an unrelenting wow. At Circular Quay thousands of people were agog, as if an autistic Almighty had used human mouths endlessly to inscribe the letter O. The Tap Dogs extravaganza went down especially well in Martin Place, where the boys got exuberant. There being no more room on the ground, they started to climb anything vertical, including tall women. One boy got all the way to the top of a flagpole. The cheers were deafening. He was part of the show. Everybody was.

  The pop anthems were uniformly dire, and the Olympic Committee top dog Juan Antonio Samaranch spoke English in a way that made you wonder if his Spanish was any better, but nothing could dent the show’s integrity. Asking Australia’s Olympic women to share the final lap of the torch was the right thing at long last, because the women’s vote lies at the heart of our democracy. All in all it was life that was celebrated, and not mere health. (In that respect, choosing the wheelchair-bound Betty Cuthbert to carry the torch into the stadium was a masterstroke.) As for asking Cathy Freeman to light the cauldron, well, it might do as much to inspire her as to weigh her down, and anyway she is a brave girl who feels free to choose, so she must have chosen this. But the best thing about the whole spectacle was that
its precision wasn’t military. When Nietzsche addressed the problem of whether there could be a work of art without an artist, the first example he came up with was the human body, and the second was the officer corps of the Prussian army. The idea caught on strong in Germany, where the Berlin Olympics in 1936 sealed the deadly conjunction between athletics and squad drill. (By no coincidence, the man in charge, Edgar Feuchtanger, turned up again as the commander of the 21st Panzer Division at Caen.) Filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi dream of beautiful bodies on the march had a long and sinister influence, but Sydney buried its last remains. At Birch’s invitation I wrote the programme note, so you must allow for a vested interest: but I guessed the show would be a bobby-dazzler and I was right. What I didn’t guess was that it would be so beautiful, a work of art. The sport will be hard-pressed to match it.

  In Martin Place there were a lot of broken beer bottles by the time I left, but as far as I could see nobody was getting hurt. It was sad to think that an equivalent concentration of young people in Britain would have been hard to trust. I can remember when the Australians were the hoons and the British behaved. The world has turned back to front: but when you think about it, the world does that all the time.

  2. THORPIE, HOOGIE AND THE GOLDEN LOLLY

  As was only appropriate following a quasi-religious experience, on the day after the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games the morning sky over Sydney was a silk sheet dyed blue by Fra Angelico. It was a blaze of glory marred only by the tubbily lurking presence of the G’day airship, the dirigibledoo. The media helicopters would appear again a bit later. At the moment they were sleeping it off with rotors limp. After a party that had lasted until nearly dawn, Sydney’s collective hangover should have screamed to heaven, but all you could see on the milling multicultural faces was uncomplicated bliss.

  Down at Rossini’s on Circular Quay I substituted an iced coffee for my usual latte in an effort to offset the heat poured forth by Australia’s newspapers, which after months of preaching imminent doom were now all vying for the title of the biggest fan of the Sydney Olympics on the face of the earth. They had plenty of competition. Real, ticket-buying, fare-paying fans from all over the planet were parading past the ferry wharves shoulder to shoulder, or backpack to backpack: a slow-motion stampede in trainer shoes. Right past my table shuffled a platoon of Japanese softball supporters who were actually holding fans: white fans with little red rising suns. They were fans with fans. From the Netherlands, fans in studiously comical hats went by uttering the strange word ‘Hoogenband’, doubtless the Dutch way of saying ‘G’day’. But the papers weren’t just full of the sensational previous night. They were predicting a series of aureate tomorrows, which would all belong to Thorpie.

  You can forget about that ‘Thorpedo’ stuff. That was just the strained coinage of an overtaxed feature writer. To the Australian public, Ian Thorpe is automatically known as Thorpie. At the age of seventeen, he has acquired the honorific diminutive, Australia’s hallowed masonic sign of universal spiritual adoption. Cathy Freeman, of course, was born with it, handily attached to her first name. But for the next week, until the swimming was over, Thorpie would outrank even Cathy. The papers assured us that Thorpie, already an icon, was about to ascend to the empyrean with his huge feet dripping chlorinated tears of molten gold, or words to that effect.

  They were right, which must have been a big relief to them, because too many of their entrail readings, most of which portended an apocalypse for Australia’s place among mature nations, had already needed to be modified in the light of reality. A bussing disaster on the Atlanta scale had been gleefully forecast, and indeed, on the eve of the opening, a female bus driver had failed to find the Olympic Park at Homebush Bay, broken down sobbing at the wheel, and required counselling. But now the buses were running like trains. The reported hillocks of unsold tickets were shrinking by the hour. An Aboriginal leader who had previously hinted that the city might be reduced to steaming ashes of protest was now on record as having found the reconciliation theme of the opening ceremony a gesture sufficient to stave off mass destruction. The sharks that were scheduled to pick off the triathletes as they desperately flailed through the harbour (veteran sharks with yellow noses and swastikas on their tail fins, hungry for one more victory) had failed to show up.

  With so little going wrong, there had to be a story in something going right, and Thorpie was the something. During the morning, his heat in the 400m freestyle filled the seats of the colossal Aquatic Centre, and during the afternoon his majestic win held the whole of Australia spellbound in the street, like the Melbourne Cup in the days when most of Australia’s TV sets were still in the windows of the appliance stores. ‘We have witnessed the birth of a legend!’ screamed a commentator. Filling the screen, Prime Minister John Howard’s radiantly ordinary face broke into a smile, as if his were the legend to whose birth we were bearing witness. In the streets of downtown Sydney, viewers numberless as the dust and high on Thorpomania took a moment off to convey their appreciation of the Prime Minister’s beauty. By the pure-hearted, affection could be detected in the storm of ritualized abuse. He will never be called Howardie, but unless he makes the mistake of slapping his beloved value-added tax on baby food he should come out of these Olympics smelling like a nasturtium. All he has to do is stand next to Thorpie as often as possible and think tall.

  Piling nirvana on Elysium, Thorpie that night swam the fourth leg of the 4×100m relay and managed to beat out the Americans by the length of his arm – which is about the length of your kitchen, but still looked pretty close. Close was far enough. The invincible Yanks had been vinced in their fave event! ‘Ian Thorpe has shown us Aussie pride, Aussie glory and Aussie spirit!’ Either it was a different commentator or the same one had gone up an octave. At Circular Quay young people were sitting on each other’s shoulders in groups of three like dancing totem poles. It was only the start of the party. As midnight approached, young people did Circus Oz acrobatics over the crowd, furthering the new Australian tendency, so prominent in the opening ceremony, for taking to the air as if it were water. Wearing a little frock consisting mainly of its fringe, a sinuous girl twisted in a red ribbon high above our heads. When she momentarily returned to earth for a quick swig I joined her in her tent for purposes of research. It turned out she was an exotic dancer who had spent several years in an English circus before coming home. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this. What about Thorpie?’

  There weren’t many wrinklies at the quay that night, but out at the Olympic Park next day they were there in force. In fact a lot of them were the force: many of the countless volunteer officials would look like bus-pass material if it weren’t for their sprightly white bush hats, kaleidoscopic shirts, and the smile induced by saying ‘Thorpie’ repeatedly. ‘What about Thorpie?’ I was asked by a woman who had been there when Murray Rose swam to a pile of gold in the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. ‘Never seen anything like him.’ Since she had seen something like him, this was a pretty good measure of the hold he had taken on the public imagination. It wasn’t just the media talking.

  On the TV screens another story temporarily leapt to prominence: the Romanian weightlifters had been busted for dope and were on their way home. In the press pavilion there was a wonderful rumour about why Channel 7, which has the games locked up – I have to tread carefully here, because Channel 7 transmits my programmes in Australia: great channel, terrific taste – strangely failed to screen their much heralded and potentially immortal images of Greg Norman carrying the torch over the Harbour Bridge. Just for that one crucial job, they had deployed a brand-new self-propelled gyro-stabilized camera with inertial navigation system, but its operator had forgotten to put in the tape. A suddenly chastened Channel 7 had asked its frozen-out rival Channel 9 whether they would care to loan their footage if they just happened to have any. Channel 9 opened all its phones so that the entire staff could give a two-word answer in unison. Apparently the camera operator was already at
the bottom of the harbour, lashed to the camera.

  This was all very fascinating but it wasn’t long before ‘Thorpie’ was once again the only word heard, except of course for the joke-hatted Dutch male fans who kept saying ‘Hoogenband’ when attempting to introduce themselves to an Australian female cop of outstanding beauty and size of gun. Australia finally found out what the word meant when Hoogenband broke the world record in his 200m semi-final. Thorpe broke his personal best in his own semi, but a pb is not the same as a wr. The final would be next day. Could Thorpe be beaten? Don’t be ridiculous.

  Next day the image of Australia’s new hero was already on the stamps, giving many a wag the chance to announce his intention of licking Thorpie. That Thorpie might be licked by Hoogenband was beyond contemplation. Thorpie, it was explained, had a strong finish that would annul Hoogenband’s undoubtedly high velocity in the initial stages. But there was a whole day to get through before the race at night, with nothing to distract Thorpie-worshippers except a hundred other Olympic events, some of them quite interesting even though taking place on dry land.

  There was news from the weightlifting. Either the dope-fiend Romanians had got all the way to Bucharest and back again in a few hours or they had never left the village. The latter proved to be true. Indeed they were still lifting weights, after paying a fine of 91,000 Australian dollars for the privilege. Would they have paid this fine if they were not guilty, and should they be lifting weights if they were? It was a mystery. So was the habit of Korean archery fans of chanting loud slogans at the very moment when the tensely concentrating Korean archer was due to let loose. Why were they doing that? Were they trying to kill a judge? And why was their archer not called Park? All their baseball players were.