Sydney 2000 Games: How an Olympic opportunity was missed

The Sydney Games were a missed business opportunity, says former bid chief Rod McGeoch.

Former Sydney Olympics supremo Rod McGeoch says tourism has not increased by nearly as much as some hoped. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Former Sydney Olympic bid chief, lawyer and businessman Rod McGeoch says Australia did not do enough to leverage the opportunities of the 2000 Games.

Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Sydney Olympics, which opened on September 15, 2000, Mr McGeoch expressed his disappointment that Australia had not been able to leverage the tourism potential from the Games and use them to develop global business connections.

He said the Games had delivered much-needed sporting facilities to Sydney, but Melbourne was set to overtake Sydney in terms of population as well as an increasingly influential financial sector.

“I see the Sydney Olympics as the big party that closed down the last century,” he said in an interview with The Australian from his home at Noosa on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, where he has been for the past few months because of the pandemic.

“It was a great party and a wonderful event, but did it really launch us into the next century? Did we do enough to use it to launch it in a way to energise Australia for the next 100 years?”

Mr McGeoch said tourism had not increased by nearly as much as some had hoped.

“When we won the Games, Australia had five million people coming every year as tourists, while Thailand, which is a much smaller economy than our own, had nine million tourists a year,” he said.

“Today, Australia gets just under nine million tourists a year and Thailand gets 60 million a year. They have been able to multiply their level of tourism by seven times and we haven’t been able to double it. I think to myself, how strategic are we? How good are we at marketing our country?”

Cathy Freeman lights the cauldron at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games opening ceremony. Picture: Colleen Petch

Mr McGeoch was managing partner at law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth when he was approached in 1991 to lead Sydney’s bid to host the 2000 Games.

Sydney won the bid in September 1993, just edging out Beijing by two votes (45 votes to 43) and easily beating Manchester, Berlin and Istanbul. Mr McGeoch went on to become a director of the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games.

He said many Australians who worked on the Sydney Games went on to have careers in event management or in the design of sporting venues. But plans in the lead-up to the Games to use them to develop a long-term “business club” of global leaders that would have ongoing connections in Australia had not materialised.

“We started Business Club Australia with Austrade,” he said. “The idea was that as people came to Australia for the Games, business people would use it to build networks with their counterparts from countries around the world — whether they were stockbrokers or electricians,” he said.

“It was quite a successful idea in the lead-up to the Games. I was the patron and, when the Games came, the club had premises at the Overseas Passenger Terminal at Circular Quay. But nothing much happened afterwards.”

He said the former Austrade official who had organised the club went on to develop a business setting up similar clubs in other countries.

“It was a bit of an example of where we went wrong in trying to leverage the opportunity of the Games for a long-term advantage,” Mr McGeoch said.

“I look back on it as a lost opportunity. When I see all the events that come to Australia, I don’t see that type of initiative to try to create something significant around the event which drives more activity for the country.

“It’s an obvious thing to do, but someone has to take the lead on these things and do it.”

The last Olympics before the 9/11 terror attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon a year later, the Sydney Games have been remembered as one of the most successful held when security was not such a heavy concern.

Cathy Freeman wins the gold medal in the women’s 400m at the Olympic Stadium in 2000.

Although the Games went off almost without a hitch, and are remembered for great moments such as Cathy Freeman lighting of the Olympic flame and her win in the 400m, Mr McGeoch said it was Melbourne that began to move ahead after 2000 in terms of growth and business influence.

“Why is it that Melbourne’s population is foreshadowed to pass Sydney’s soon?” Mr Mc­Geoch said. “Why is it that their port is now the major container port around the country? Why is it that Melbourne now dominates the financial funds management business? There are signs that the amount of retail and office space in Melbourne is almost greater than that in Sydney, particularly with the development of the Docklands area.”

He said Brisbane could learn from the shortcomings of Sydney in leveraging the long-term potential from a Games.

Mr McGeoch, who is chairman of Chubb Insurance Australia, chairman of Vantage Private Equity Growth, a director of Destination NSW, deputy chairman of the Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust and a former director of Ramsay Health Care, said Brisbane would be “very hard to beat” for the 2032 Games.

“At the moment there doesn’t appear to be another city ready to roll up its sleeves and have a go (at bidding for the 2032 Games),” Mr McGeoch said.

Sydney’s successful staging of the Games had shown that governments in Australia would deliver on any promises they made on the staging of a Games or a World Cup or a convention.

“The Games gave us an immediate seal of approval when it came to the issue of whether governments could deliver,” Mr McGeoch said. “Once you have held a successful Games, there is no question mark that you are up to it and you can do it.” This would be an important factor in the International Olympic Committee’s consideration of the Brisbane bid for the 2032 Games.

“Having held the Games it shows that Australia is capable of hosting major events,” he said. “In Sydney’s case it was beyond doubt. That will translate over to Brisbane. The federal government will have to guarantee it as well, but the capacity of the Queensland government to host the Games is beyond doubt.”

An aerial view of Sydney Olympic Park. Says Rod McGeoch: ‘It is a magnificent piece of public infrastructure with its wide boulevards and the feeling of space.’

He said it should be remembered that Sydney hosted the 2000 Games without NSW incurring any extra debt or financing it by any levies or increases in taxes.

He said the IOC was prepared to give the host of the 2032 Games $US1bn ($1.38bn) to help stage the Games, which would help cushion the financial impact of an Olympics in southeast Queensland.

Mr McGeoch said if Brisbane won the right to host the 2032 Games, a decision that could be made as early as next year, it should consider setting up a committee of business leaders, similar to the National COVID-19 Commission set up by the federal government to handle the business response to the pandemic, to focus on the Games’ long-term legacies.

“With the Sydney Games we needed something like the COVID commission (led by former Fortescue Metals chief executive Nev Power),” Mr McGeoch said. “We needed a group of high-powered business people from all over which could spend time on long-term planning and harnessing the legacy of the Games.”

Mr McGeoch said he did not think the arts sector in Australia benefited as much as it could have from the Sydney Games. His idea had been to have talent contests around Australia to recruit young people to appear as dancers and singers in the opening and closing ceremonies. This would have helped produce a group of talented young Australians who would have been able to use the opportunity to boost their careers.

He said it was disappointing to see marching bands brought in from the US for an event before the Games, which implied there were no marching bands in Australia that were up to scratch. “Why didn’t we do better for the arts?” he asked.

Mr McGeoch said he was pleased with the legacy of Sydney Olympic Park at Homebush.

“It is a magnificent piece of public infrastructure with its wide boulevards and the feeling of space,” he said. “You can meander down to the harbour. It is well serviced by buses and trains with Bicentennial Park next to it.”

He said this approach should be taken to the development of the Moore Park sports precinct in Sydney, opening up the area to allow people to walk around the cricket and football stadiums.

Mr McGeoch said that when Sydney hosted the Games there was little attention given to the challenges of having to maintain large sporting facilities afterwards.

He said Sydney should follow the example of Victoria, which had two large stadiums in Melbourne and one in Geelong to host AFL games.

“(In NSW) we don’t need to build a major stadium for every single AFL team and rugby league team around the state,” he said

The move to have the SCG Trust take over all NSW government-owned stadiums, bringing them under the one authority, would allow more co-ordination of events and efficiencies in terms of maintenance.

If the move is approved by the NSW parliament, Mr McGeoch would be deputy chairman of the combined authority under SCG chairman Tony Shepherd.

“Here we are in 2020 finally putting all of the venues under a single authority,” Mr McGeoch said. “It will mean one authority looks after all the venues, adopting a more competitive attitude to bidding for events so they are not bidding against each other.”