Authors: Clive James
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.
If you didn’t have 91,000 dollars for a fresh supply of dope, the beach volleyball was the most effective time-killer. Here, at last, was a case of the press and the protesters having
successfully predicted a catastrophe. The stadium on Bondi beach had been designed so that nobody inside it could see the beach, and was so vast that nobody outside it could see the beach either.
Those inside suffered the additional insult of being subjected to the volleyball, an event whose already perfect stupidity was abetted by boom-box music and a screaming commentary. Many of the
female competitors were very pretty, an effect aided by their attire, which tended towards a vanishing point between their inner thighs. The TV cameras behaved reasonably well, closing in for the
butt shot only with the excuse that the girls made finger signals behind their backs. What the signals meant remained a puzzle, especially after they were explained by barely coherent experts, but
one of them seemed to indicate that the competitor’s costume, to the detriment of her manoeuvrability, would shortly disappear altogether unless extracted by a gynaecologist.
The anxious evening was ushered in by vox-pops focused on the race. Suddenly elevated to the status of prime interviewees, the joke-hatted Dutch fans were saying stuff like
‘Hoogenband’s goana beat your Ion Torp.’ The idea was still a gag but only just, because when Hoogenband stood beside Thorpe on the blocks he looked just as big, had the
same-sized feet and seemed no more overawed than a naval shell being loaded into a gun. What happened next was an education for everyone concerned except him, the Dutch fans in the hats, and all
the girls in Holland, for whom the wonder boy is an Apollo propelled through a lake of champagne by the aching force of their desire.
Right to the end the Aussie commentators were still talking about Thorpe’s unbeatable finish, but Hoogenband had burned it off with his unbeatable start, and in the end it was he who stood
on the golden lolly. In Australia when I was young, sweets were called lollies. The medal podiums on the Sydney pool deck look like big lollies. Thorpe had already stood on the golden lolly twice,
but this time it was Hoogenband’s turn, and Thorpie stood on the silver.
Thorpie took it well, kept his poise, and on the next night came out of the call room undaunted to lead the Australian world record-breaking 4 × 200 m relay victory. But his biggest
victory was to stay in one piece on the night Australia found out he was mortal. He already knew it. The mature nation has produced a mature young man: a good sign. At Circular Quay, for the first
time, there were people who left the party early, but they’d be back the next night. I heard one of them say ‘Hoogie was too good.’ Pieter van den Hoogenband had become Hoogie.
There could be no better way for Australia to take over the world.
With Cathy Freeman yet to run, the first week of the Sydney Olympics would still have been a dreamtime for Australia even without the sparkling results from the big billabong.
Blessed by heavenly weather, clever organization and twenty million people ready to party it up for two and a half weeks solid if they absolutely had to, the games were a hit. But it was a bonus
that the Aussie swimmers had made an initial assault which left even the Americans flabbergasted.
It was too good to last. In fact if it
had
lasted it would have been bad, because it would have meant that nobody else had bothered learning to swim. They had, however: and especially
the Dutch, who had come out of nowhere – i.e. the Netherlands – to remind even Ian Thorpe that majestic young men with unfeasibly large feet had been born elsewhere on the planet at
about the same time as he was.
Primus inter pares
among these was Pieter van den Hoogenband. When Hoogie touched out Thorpie over 200m, Australia woke up. The continuous party was still on
for young and old, as they say locally, but the bodies under the tables and draped over the banisters were suddenly galvanized again and staring at the TV screens, where Hoogie’s face was all
too frequently to be seen, unabashed by his own temerity and handsome beyond belief.
Most Australians have never seen David Ginola, but if, by some trick of instantaneous teleportation, he had appeared in his underpants in downtown Sydney, the young women would have run over him
like small trucks to grab a piece of the preposterously handsome Hoogie. Still smiling like Julia Roberts being awarded an Oscar in her bathtub, the next night Hoogie took out the 100m three places
ahead of Australia’s Michael Klim, whose mere appearance – shaven head, vulpine smile, the eyes of a cashiered SMERSH officer pledged to wreak vengeance with a stolen atomic bomb
– can usually be relied on to drain the opposition’s will to live.
Australia’s darling, the kanga-cuddling Susie O’Neill, unexpectedly took out the 200m freestyle, but equally unexpectedly swam second in her fave event, the 200m butterfly, beaten by
America’s wonderfully named Misty Hyman, who sounded like a doubtful virgin from mythology but responded to the Aussie cheers for Susie by going faster herself. The Americans loved the idea
of so much attention being focused on swimming. In the USA hardly anybody cares. In Australia hardly anybody doesn’t. Misty, already equipped with the honorific diminutive, joined Hoogie on
the short roster of aquatic adoptees. It helped that she looked like a bit of a kanga-hugger herself.
American back-stroker Lenny Krayzelburg was harder to adore. He psyched our boys out in the preliminary races by leaving off his cap and bodysuit and swimming in nothing but hip-slinger
trunkettes, in the same way that snow-bums wear street clothes to make you feel like an idiot for buying all that expensive gear. But in the finals, decently dressed, he was so good that he earned
from the Australian crowd the rarely awarded supplementary diminutive, given to the second name of an adoptee who already has one on the first. He was not only Lenny, he was Krazy. (There is an
Australian girl diver called Loudy Torky, but she was probably born that way, unless her real name is Loud Talk.)