How Roy, HG and Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat stole the show in Sydney 2000

For the past 10 years, among the nearly 500 steel poles outside ANZ Stadium which form an abstract art installation called "Games Memories", an empty plinth has stood as a constant reminder of a crime which, to this day, remains unsolved.

It was once home to a small fibreglass statue of Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat, the unofficial mascot who took the Sydney 2000 Olympics by storm.

At some point on the night of the 2010 NRL grand final between St George Illawarra and Sydney Roosters, Fatso was stolen. The perpetrator has never been found and the plinth has been bare ever since.

For Fatso's forefathers, "Rampaging" Roy Slaven and HG Nelson - or John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver - the mishandling of the case by NSW law enforcement remains a sore point.

"I'm still really annoyed that the police commissioner, nobody has said anything about the theft of Fatso," Slaven told The Herald and The Age. "I'm outraged and I'm not alone, I don't think. Most Australians are outraged. The plinth is still out there at Stadium Australia with no Fatso on it, and some criminal types obviously have it in their lounge room or the backyard or desecrating it in some way."

HG - Pickhaver - has a theory as to its whereabouts.

"I've been told that if you go round to Bruce McAvaney's place and open the double-garage door, you'll see a pair of buttocks that you've seen before, aimed right at you where the HSV used to be," he said.

"Connected to the buttocks, with intricate and imaginative plumbing, is a couple of gas tanks - and the flame, I'm reliably informed, was taken before it was extinguished from the grand old girl at Stadium Australia. Bruce has kept the flame alive, on the buttocks, for 20 years."

Roy Slaven and HG Nelson - aka John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver - provided one of the highlights of the Sydney 2000 Olympics with their show, The Dream.

"I think if I was heading the taskforce," said Slaven, "that's where my questioning would start - at Mr McAvaney's house."

But here's a rare slice of good news in 2020: Fatso's coming home. The case itself hasn't been cracked, but the Sydney Olympic Park Authority has seen fit to mark the 20-year anniversary of the Games by commissioning a new statue and putting the big-bottomed marsupial back on his public shrine, where he belongs.

This provides us with a perfect opportunity to reflect on the legacy of the "battler's prince" and the loose anti-Olympic establishment movement he once led.

As Roy and HG, Australia's favourite fictional sports broadcasters, Doyle and Pickhaver have made long careers out of straddling the fine line between honouring Australia's obsession with sport and ridiculing it.

The Dream with Roy and HG, which aired every night at 11pm during the 2000 Olympics, remains their undisputed peak - and their first hit, having spent the previous 15 years carving out their own niche on radio and television with mock calls of rugby league grand finals and State of Origin, and the cult variety show Club Buggery.

Host broadcasters Seven offered them a blank canvas. And so Roy and HG took the ball and ran with it, expanding and adapting their irreverent act from a mostly domestic focus to the grandeur of the Olympic stage, deflating the pomposity of those who held it most dear.

Roy and HG hold court at the Sydney 2000 closing ceremony.Credit: Phil Carrick

Material was everywhere. They dubbed their own commentary over obscure events - most famously, men's gymnastics. Terms like "battered sav", "crazy date" and "hello boys" were coined to describe manoeuvres while they made up facts on the spot about the competitors. Somehow, their jokes never crossed the line to insult.

Their interviews were similar. One guest, American swimmer Gary Hall Jr - the guy who said his relay team would smash Australia "like guitars" - had been suspended two years earlier for marijuana use. So, of course, Roy asked him if he'd had a chance to sample the local ganja.

Official Sydney 2000 mascots Syd, Millie and Ollie - or "Syd, Ollie and Dickhead" as they would become known - also caught their ire.

One day in the lead-up to the Olympics, as they met with their producer Todd Abbott in Centennial Park to toss around some ideas, the concept of creating their own rival mascot came to them out of the blue.

"These mascots have given us the shits forever," Pickhaver said. "None of them are any good. They're obviously constructed usually by some sort of marketing backroom ... [but] we understood what Australia wants."

"What we wanted to invent was a mascot that was not for sale, that somehow represented the higher Olympic ideals - or the ideals the Olympics once pretended to have," Doyle said. "The only instruction was that he had to have a huge arse."

Olly, Syd and Millie, the official Sydney 2000 mascots, didn't do it for Roy and HG.

Abbott put it to a cartoonist he knew, Paul Newell, who was part of a circle of friends that attended Sydney Swans matches together at the SCG.

"I actually knew the guy that had designed the [official mascots] and I'd talked to him about them previously. I was like, 'They're OK, but' ... I wasn't as big a fan of the style, the look of them," Newell said.

"They're a bit more commercialised and made to look a certain way and I just didn't think it worked. Whereas Fatso, when the idea came up, it was great. I thought it gave it a bit of that ratbag larrikinism that's part of Australia."

Newell hand-animated several sequences of a cartoon Fatso that were used during the show - for instance, he would crawl across the screen and deposit a "nugget" during an unfavourable highlight. A stuffed toy Fatso sat on Roy and HG's desk for most of the show's two-week run.

But the moment Fatso really took off was on day five of the Games, when Australia won gold in the 4x200m men's freestyle relay. Another producer, Edwina Throsby, hatched a plan to thrust Fatso into the arms of medal-winning athletes at the pool. Michael Klim had no idea of its broader significance at the time, but took the plush wombat with him on the dais.

Todd Pearson, Michael Klim, Ian Thorpe and William Kirby celebrated gold for Australia after the 4x200m freestyle relay ... with Fatso.Credit: Craig Golding

It sparked a mini-scandal. The Australian Olympic Committee had, years earlier, purchased the rights to use the famous boxing kangaroo, and planned to use it as the spearhead of a multi-million dollar merchandising campaign at Sydney 2000. Suddenly, Fatso was a threat.

"It came at a time too where it was pretty early days - people were looking for stories and the press were a little bit bored, they were looking for something to talk about, so they raised it with the AOC," Doyle said.

Though the IOC and AOC denied it publicly, athletes were reportedly told to distance themselves from Fatso. When one journalist asked Klim and relay teammate Grant Hackett at a press conference why they brought Fatso to the dais, they were stopped from answering the question by Australia's assistant chef de mission Peter Montgomery.

"It's a matter of some commercial sensitivity, and I'd prefer not to answer the question," Montgomery said.

Of course, as soon as there was the first hint of resistance from officialdom, Roy and HG mined it for all it was worth. It was, as Doyle said, a "perfect storm" - it only made Fatso more popular. A star was born, and there was little the powers that be could do about it.

"We enjoyed it, because we knew they were squirming," Doyle said.

AOC president John Coates doesn't quite remember it that way.

"The IOC might have looked at it to start," Coates said. "But it didn't worry me at all. Obviously we have to approve logos, there's marketing and licensing rights attached to them, but this was harmless. And it was very, very welcomed. The athletes loved it, and that's all that matters."

The battler's prince, in all his glory.

In fact, Coates credits Roy and HG with playing a key role in building camaraderie within the Australian ranks. During the Games, Coates lived in the athlete's village out of temporary accommodation, near a common room where the athletes would meet and mingle at night after events. There was also a television.

"While they could have been watching other sport, Roy and HG I can remember was the dominant one," he said. "I put my head in there from time to time. They loved watching other athletes having the mickey taken out of them. It actually, I think, played an important part of team morale. It brought the team together and the Australian athletes were very proud of it."

Foreigners were in on the joke too. "If it wasn't for this show," said American sprinter Jon Drummond on the final episode of The Dream, "I'd probably be the gold medallist. Because I sat up so many nights and watched this and laughed. It's your fault! I'm sure athletes all over the village that are watching this are saying to themselves if it wasn't for you guys allowing us to not take ourselves so serious ... we needed comic relief and you guys have been there for us."

Like the show, Fatso also crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries. Pickhaver recalls at least 20 or 30 international TV programs wanted a piece of him, while sporting identities such as Billie Jean King, Carl Lewis and Eric 'The Eel" Moussambani lined up to be seen with him. He even landed on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Long before Twitter became a thing, Fatso was trending worldwide.

Doyle, as Slaven, summed up his appeal with a faux-emotive monologue on the show. "The whole world sees him as a mascot that does celebrate humanity," he said. "The little guy that stands for all that's good and decent about the Games. It's about people, against all hardship, overcoming hardship, and pressing on with their lives. Sure, they mightn't get gold or silver or bronze every time, but they put in! He's the battler's prince!"

Instead of Syd, Millie, Ollie or the boxing kangaroo, tourists scoured Sydney looking for Fatso memorabilia. "Lots and lots of people are coming in asking for it," Anne Safarian of the Aussie Koala Shop in The Rocks told The Daily Telegraph at the time. "We didn't know what people were talking about but then yesterday we were watching television and my son said: 'That's it! That's the wombat everyone is asking for!'"

Some Fatso merchandise was made, but it was all unofficial - cashing in on his popularity, Doyle and Pickhaver said, would have been contrary to the whole spirit of the exercise, and they had Seven in their corner.

Two decades on from using an overweight wombat to skewer the increasing commercialisation of the Olympics, Doyle and Pickhaver sense the relationship between sport and the community has shifted irrevocably.

"It's hard to imagine now because time's moved on ... but when people participated in sport they did it because it was a good idea, because it was fun," Pickhaver said.

Roy and HG with their 'little guy'.Credit: Fairfax

"Not because they thought it was a career path, a pathway to riches in the Premier League or playing baseball in America or stuff like that. What are we up to today? If I join the Rabbits or rugby union I can get paid $3 million.

"I often, in quieter moments, discuss the idea that the Olympics, as represented by Sydney, was a 20th century idea. Look at what they're suggesting for 2021 - nevermind the COVID, they're suggesting a fly-in, fly-out Olympics, meaning that people would fly up for the day to do the event and come back.

"The whole thing of them postponing it, the enormous amount of money and the television rights, it's unimaginable [what] forces them to do that - I think it is really of a completely different order to the Sydney Olympics."

"It's sinking under its own weight, really," said Doyle. "It's just drifting further and further away from the largely amateur spectacle it used to be. I don't know where the Olympics goes, but I agree the high-water mark was Sydney. It's been downhill ever since."

There were, in the end, only two genuine Fatso collectibles. The first was a solid gold pin, which was gifted to every guest on The Dream. Worth around $400, one was apparently auctioned recently for nearly $5000.

And then there's the plush toy version of Fatso - of which Doyle believes three were made, and only one made available to the public in an auction for Olympic Aid, won by Seven boss Kerry Stokes with a bid of $80,450. For years, Fatso was said to live in a glass box in his North Sydney office. All the network would say about his current whereabouts is: "Fatso is safely under lock and key in the Kerry Stokes private collection."

The other two stuffed Fatsos - the ones used for in-show stuntwork, like the memorable mascot diving contest - went to Doyle and Pickhaver. "They're not as pristine as Kerry's," Doyle said.

"I think I've got the one that went in the pool," said Pickhaver. "He's a difficult beast to deal with. He largely lives in the dark at my place."

Cartoonist Paul Newell with the new sculpture of Fatso that will soon be restored to its plinth outside ANZ Stadium.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

For the rest of us, there's the new statue at Olympic Park to admire. For however long it lasts.

Retired from duty after Sydney 2000, Fatso remains one of the enduring images of the Games, seared in the memories of millions. For the men behind Roy and HG, it's a source of great pride - although with their own weekly ABC radio show to focus on, Bludging on the Blindside, the "battler's prince" hardly ever rates a mention these days.

"It rarely comes up, I have to say," said Doyle. "But I am mindful that whenever the statue gets put up, someone nicks it, so it's obviously of some interest to someone.

"I think it was just one of those things that at the time, it rang true when a lot of other things rang hollow. For that reason I think it's probably endured."

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