Rod McGeoch led the team which won the bid and sat on the board of the organising committee in the years leading up to the 2000 Games, hailed by International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch as the best ever.

Now, three years after southeast Queensland won the rights to the 2032 Games, enthusiasm for it is ebbing amid years of political bickering over the location, cost and impact of redeveloping venues including Brisbane’s Gabba to host sports and ceremonies.

Speaking ahead of his keynote address to the Bulletin’s Future Gold Coast breakfast on July 25, the 78-year-old said it was time to end the political battles and focus on delivering both the best-possible event and the infrastructure which will make it possible.

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He called for a strong leader who could be the face of the 2032 Olympic Games and be lobbying day in, day out for projects.

“We’ve got to try and get it politically impartial because the goal is to get things to run well and be exciting, because that’s great for the state, so we need all sides to put their hand up rather than pick each other off and keep polarising opinion in the city and the media,” he said.

“It needs a leader, someone who’s working all the time inside Parliament House with the big business stakeholders that’s got a serious program that is credible, a timeline, and has the ability to attract support.

“You’ve got to launch a new logo, new mascots and make all those major community activities.”

Mr McGeoch said it was critical for Games bosses to win back the public.

“(They need to) rebuild it and go back to the story,” he said. “The need to say ‘The first three years was all of our planning, so here’s what we’re now going to do. Let’s all get into it’,” he said.

“Somebody with greater communication strategic skills than me needs to work on all of that.”

THE MAN BEHIND THE PLAN

Mr McGeoch had been a long-time legal figure before he was tapped in the early 1990s to lead Sydney’s bid for the 2000s Olympic Games.

The city had been trying to get the ‘greatest show on earth’ since the late 1970s when then-premier Neville Wran envisaged hosting the 1988 event to coincide with Australia’s bicentennial celebrations.

While it lost out on that bid to South Korea’s Seoul, the blueprint of that plan formed the foundation of Sydney’s successful push announced in Monte Carlo, Monaco on September 24, 1993. Sydney beat out Manchester, Istanbul, Berlin and Beijing.

It was a moment known for Samaranch’s famous pronouncement “and the winner is Sydney”, kicking off a seven-year race to the finish to have the city ready to host Australia’s biggest-ever event.

Mr McGeoch said it had gained the support of Olympic delegates through the use of a charm offensive designed to show off the city.

“On every single visit of an International Olympic Committee (IOC) member, from the airport, the traffic lights went green at every intersection just before they got there,” he said.

“Usually, on one evening, they went to the Opera and Donald McDonald, who was on the bid committee, would not even allow the production to start until the IOC members and their partners were sitting in their front row.

“The VIP car would come down George Street with all the lights going green as they travelled into the Opera House, they’d get in their seat and Donald would then give a wink and the show would start.

“Now, that’s what you need to start with and then when you’ve won the games, you’ve got to try and hold it together.”

SYDNEY 2000

The 2000 Games of the 27th Olympiad began on Friday, September 15, 2000 and were an immediate success.

It produced iconic moments such as singer Nikki Webster’s performance, runner Cathy Freeman both lighting the Olympic cauldron and winning the 400m sprint and the heroics of the Australian swimming team against the highly-rated US.

It also marked the farewells of several of Australia’s best-known athletes of the previous decade – Kieran Perkins, Daniel Kowolski and Susie O’Neill.

But beyond the sports, it pumped billions into the economy.

However it took years for many of the venues at Homebush to become financially viable or regularly used beyond Stadium Australia.

Mr McGeoch said his only regret from the Games was the lack of immediate legacy that it left.

“I was actually in hospital for most of the Games with viral encephalitis but my kids who were late teens used to come and visit me each evening, and it was like they’d just been at a Beatles concert,” he said.

“You couldn’t control them, they were having so much fun and just the whole fortnight, Sydney was just unbelievable.

“And people still talk about it all the time. It was the most unique time in Sydney but I wanted to get a bigger impact than that and a longer impact.

“So we are known in Games history, I guess more by critics and by supporters that we didn’t get the ongoing legacy we should have planned for.”

WASTED TIME?

The success of the southeast Queensland bid for the 2032 Olympic Games was announced in July 2021 in Tokyo, giving Brisbane, the Gold Coast and other co-hosts including Sunshine Coast an 11-year lead-in, the longest on record.

Just months later, ex-IOC marketing boss Michael Payne, who gave that year’s Future Gold Coast keynote address, urged political leaders against wasting the opportunity.

Mr Payne has been a marketing brain at the past 20 summer and Winter Olympics and is widely recognised for helping to save the Games brand following the hugely successful Los Angeles bonanza in 1984.

“The problem with the Olympics is it is a non-negotiable deadline whether you are ready or not and that’s fairly rare when it comes to politicians,” he said at the time.

“They need to use the decade leading up to the Games effectively (rather than leave it until the last minute) because there will always be surprises.

“Budgets have a habit of blowing out if there is a last-minute scramble and, famously, Montreal got so far behind in building its facilities that workers were paid triple time on 24-hour shifts to get things finished.”

Despite Mr Payne’s warning, the past three years have largely been full of political infighting over the Games and the price of venues amid a cost-of-living crisis.

The planned $4bn redevelopment of the Gabba in Brisbane was abandoned, while a proposal to build a new venue at Victoria Park was also dumped.

Mr McGeoch said the first three years of the Games lead-in had been useful for planning but warned the fighting over it needed to end.

He said the time had not been wasted.

“It’s all very well, that’s nice advice (from Mr Payne) and it superficially sounds pretty sensible and it probably is but we’ve got cities in Australia that have hosted Commonwealth Games before and Olympic Games before,” he said.

“You need to understand where you’re strong, where you’re weak, how to fix it, and so on and then it’s critical that as you start, you carry all of the stakeholders in the city with you.

“In my whole three-and-a-half years of bidding (for the 2000 Games) Labor never disagreed with the Liberals about our strategy to win, business was behind us, the community was behind us.

“What’s happened in Brisbane so far is the opportunity has been given to turn it into a political battle about where’s the stadium going to be and all this stuff, which we never had.

“If your media is with you and you’re carrying that momentum, you’ve got stakeholders that get it. And therefore they’re, ‘Okay, well, we know what we’re doing. What else do you need us to do?’ Rather than ‘Oh, the stadium shouldn’t be here, it shouldn’t be there’.”

WELCOMING THE WORLD – LOS ANGELES 2028 AND BEYOND

The promotional efforts for the Queensland Games cannot begin essentially until the closing ceremony of the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

The conclusion of that ceremony will feature a brief preview of the next host nation and facilitates the transfer of the Olympic branding.

Once this occurs, Mr McGeoch said Olympics bosses would have to mount an epic charm offensive to the world, starting with the closing ceremony.

“It’s very important people understand it, during each four-year Olympiad, the host who’s got that Games is the only place allowed to use the Olympic rings and various marketing rules apply. So until LA’s over, you can’t really do quite a lot of stuff,” he said.

“If you’re looking for Olympic rings and logos and all kinds of different things, there are major restrictions, so that we don’t undermine the worldwide sponsors that are backing LA.

“However, after that, you’ve got four clear years and nobody’s to tread on your doorstep.”

The Sydney Games were previewed at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta with images of Australian life, most famously including giant inflatable kangaroos on the backs of performers riding bicycles.

Mr McGeoch said 2032 Games bosses should look at harnessing Australia’s top cultural figures, such as Chris and Liam Hemsworth and movie director Baz Luhrmann rather than athletes, to sell the event to the world.

“At the opening of the Olympic Museum in 1993 in Lausanne, who did I take? I took (world-famous opera singer) Joan Sutherland.

“In other words, who are your greatest ambassadors? Are they the Nicole Kidmans and the Cate Blanchett recognised in every corner of the world? Whereas if you took (cricketer) Pat Cummins, if you don’t play cricket, you wouldn’t have an idea who he was, as nice a man as he is.

“So my first reaction would be to make absolutely sure that some of those faces are with us.”