How the 2000 Olympics changed the face of Sydney

It has been 25 years since the Sydney Olympics — the event officials declared the “best games ever” and marked one of the proudest moments in Australian history.

In September 2000, just after the turn of the millennium, the world watched as running champion Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic cauldron at the opening ceremony.

It kicked off perhaps the biggest party Sydney has ever hosted, lasting 16 days and nights.

While widely regarded as one of the most successful modern Olympics, years of work went into ensuring Sydney could fully capitalise on its moment in the spotlight.

After formal bids for the 1992 Brisbane and 1996 Melbourne Olympic Games failed, there was nationwide euphoria when the 2000 Games were awarded to Sydney following a tense ballot in 1993.

Sydney only narrowly won over Beijing, and what followed was a period of dramatic urban renewal.

Resurrecting Sydney from the economic doldrums

Frank Sartor was the lord mayor of Sydney for the entire period spanning the successful 1993 bid to the completion of the 2000 Games.

He had inherited a lifeless city that was “broke and in debt”, and there were questions about whether Sydney was up to the job of hosting the Olympics.

While the city council focused on giving the CBD a facelift, the NSW and federal governments got to work developing a whole new precinct for the Olympic venues.

The site that had been earmarked for Sydney Olympic Park was an industrial wasteland known as Homebush Bay in the city’s west.

The mammoth task of redeveloping the area fell to David Richmond, a veteran public servant who had already built a reputation of wrangling complex and often controversial public projects.

He was appointed director-general of the Olympic Coordination Authority in 1995.

“One of the great achievements of the Olympics was the remediation of the whole site, which was a massive and controversial task,” he said.

Once the contaminated land was dug up and contained, the team led by Mr Richmond had to move quickly to get the venues built in time for the 2000 Games.

“When I got the Olympic job, I had to pretend that I didn’t love the Olympics because I had to make a lot of hard decisions and be very hard-nosed,” he said.

“The day that the Olympics started, one of my close colleagues said, ‘You actually like this stuff, don’t you?’ I said, ‘I love it’.”

Olympic torchbearers provide the warm-up act

In the months leading up to the 2000 Olympics, excitement was building across the nation as the torch relay wound its way through deserts, across mountains, before finally arriving in Sydney.

Richard Cashman, a sports historian who has closely studied the Games, was among the 12,000 torchbearers.

“When I held the torch and I ran my 500 metres, my feet didn’t touch the ground. It was so euphoric,” he said.

The relay culminated with Cathy Freeman lighting the Olympic cauldron — a symbolic moment in the Games that came close to becoming an international debacle.

For almost four heart-stopping minutes, the cauldron came stuck on its way to the top of the stadium.

“Apparently there were people underneath the cauldron and banging away trying to get it to work.”

After the initial glitch, the cauldron continued its journey to the top of the stadium where it burned for the remainder of the Games.

Sydney 2000’s legacy of volunteering

As crowds poured into the venues throughout the Olympics, an army of volunteers was working behind the scenes to ensure the Games ran smoothly.

More than 40,000 volunteers were recruited from across the country for a wide variety of roles.

Sandy Barker was a teacher in Perth who took a few weeks of leave without pay to take up a volunteer security role at the Games.

“There was a real pride that it was coming to Sydney, and once I got the kernel of the idea of volunteering, I was really determined and had to really fight to get that time off work,” Ms Barker said.

With a clipboard and walkie-talkie in hand, she was tasked with checking the credentials of competitors, officials and politicians at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Hall in Darling Harbour.

For Laura White, who had hopes of competing as a canoeist in the Olympics, volunteering became a way of salvaging those dreams.

“I realised when I was about 13 that I didn’t have the speed to make the Olympics myself, but then I was told I could become an official, and it kind of grew from there,” Ms White said.

Ms White, who went on to volunteer at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, said the volunteer culture at Sydney set the standard for future events.

“I think everybody since then has been trying to emulate just how good the volunteers and officials were at Sydney Olympics,” she said.

How Sydney dodged the Olympic graveyard path

Another major legacy of the 2000 Games is Sydney Olympic Park, which managed to avoid the fate of other Olympic cities that have become graveyards for white elephants.

The precinct attracted a record 11.9 million visitors in the 2023-24 financial year, and all competition venues remain in use.

Allison Taylor, chief executive of the Sydney Olympic Park Business Association, said it has evolved from being a solely sporting precinct to one of entertainment.

The area is also home to about 5,000 residents — many of whom live in the Olympic Village which was refurbished into housing after the Games.

Sydney’s Olympic housing legacy still taking shape

Now, Sydney Olympic Park is on the brink of another major transformation.

The Sydney West Metro line, due to open in 2032, will include a station at Olympic Park, as will stage two of the Parramatta Light Rail project.

Ms Taylor said those improved transport links would be an “absolute game changer” and pave the way for more housing and commercial development.

A draft masterplan by the NSW government suggests Olympic Park could accommodate an extra 25,000 residents by 2050.

But as Sydney grapples with a chronic housing shortage, some are calling for more ambitious targets.

Gary White, the state’s chief planner from 2015 to 2019, has suggested the precinct could accommodate up to 70,000 residents.

“With Olympic Park you’ve got a site at the geographic centre of Sydney. It’s a site that deserves an innovative, outside-the-box approach,” he said.

“We’ve waited 25 years, it’s a quarter of a century since the Olympic Games, so there’s still a feeling of waiting and wanting something that’s responding to one of the most significant sites in metropolitan Sydney.”