|
Outsports Clubhouse: Membership For Gay Sports Fans And Athletes
|
|
|
 |
 |
| |
(Almost) No Worries, Mate, Down Under
 By Jim Buzinski
Outsports.com
The men, women and weather were hot, the accents were beguiling and the setting was beautiful. All in all, the Gay Games would be hard-pressed to find a more welcoming city.
The weeklong Games, which attracted 13,000 jocks and thousands more participants, survived organizational chaos and lack of money to keep their place as a must-attend event every four years.
The Games have become almost too big to fail, relying on the tremendous goodwill and patience of the community of gay and lesbian athletes. It?s a group that will forgive a lot as long as a good show is put on. My guess is that few attendees knew that Sydney 2002 came close to shutting its doors beforehand and that even fewer cared once the Opening Ceremonies took place.
As the Sydney Star-Observer (which provided terrific coverage) aptly put it: ?The Sydney 2002 Gay Games were a sporting, cultural, ceremonial and community success story, but they?re about to leave organizers with a hefty debt.? The paper placed the debt as high as $2 million Australian ($1.1 million US), including $253,000 USD in fees owed to the Federation of Gay Games.
This is the second Games in a row that barely came off. But come off they did and to an almost universal positive reaction. You get the sense that not even the Three Stooges and the guys from ?Dude, Where?s My Car?? could screw the Games up.
It was hard not to have a grand time Down Under. Let?s start with the Australians?an utterly charming bunch who went way out to their way to help. ?No worries, mate? seems to be the national motto. And few worries there were (save for directions; Syndey-siders were cheerfully clueless when giving them and we quickly learned to ignore their instructions and look on a map).
Sydney itself is very cosmopolitan and lent itself well to such a big event. The city?s inner core is quite walkable and the public transportation is terrific. Add in sunny and warm weather and you had an ideal setting for the Games.
However, most people in Sydney seemed not to know the Games were going on, and this is the major fault of the organizers. Many people I spoke with, either didn?t know the Games were underway or had only a dim knowledge of them. One problem was the lack of signs, especially when compared with New York in 1994 and Amsterdam in 1998. There were about two dozen large Gay Games banners, but they were all concentrated in one area near Hyde Park, a small part of the sprawling city.
Powerlifting was a typical example?no signs anywhere near the facility, and inside an 8x11 photocopy announcing the competition. Third-graders would have been more inventive. In New York, in contrast, signs would greet you a few blocks from a venue and get you to the facility quickly. In Sydney, Crocodile Dundee would have had trouble finding many venues.
The lack of a public awareness of the Games was most noticeable at Olympic Park, site of several major competitions, including tennis, aquatics, volleyball and track. One would have expected the complex to be festooned with colorful banners and filled with booths selling merchandise and food; kind of a mini-Olympic village. But there was nothing to unify the venues and it resulted in a dead atmosphere.
The success of each sport was very dependent on the host organizing group, and this made for uneven competitions, though almost all went well. The wrestlers and swimmers, for example, raved about their meets, from the choice of venue to the officials. Basketball players were almost uniformly positive about their tournament. Ice hockey players, though, compared the surface they played on to ?frozen oatmeal.?
Tennis was the one big sport I saw that seemed the most poorly run. In Amsterdam, a beautiful tennis club provided the setting, replete with terrific viewing areas and amenities that kept players at the facility, even when they were eliminated. In Sydney, these amenities were missing.
At the Olympic Park venue (where I watched tennis), players early on were allowed only two balls per match--totally inadequate. The courts were hot, but there was almost no shade and the only water came from fountains themselves sitting in the sun. The result was that players high-tailed it out of there as soon as their matches were over, leaving medal matches to be watched by a handful of loyal friends. It was like watching a tournament on a suburban mall parking lot.
The lack of media coverage was another notable absence. Of the mainstream press, only Anthony Dennis in the Sydney Morning Herald provided daily coverage; the rest seemed not to care. Part of the problem was that the organizers were not very helpful to the media and reporters I know simply gave up trying to deal with them. Part also seemed to be that the press still has no clue how to cover the Games; are they competition or are they entertainment? Part, though, no doubt came from the provincial attitude that their readers didn?t want daily doses of pooftahs on parade.
These quibbles, however, will recede in the memory banks of those who went, replaced by warmer thoughts of sunsets at the Opera House, pumpkin soup to die for, same-sex couples holding hands without fear and the sense that we are, in fact, everywhere.
Photo from Opening Ceremonies / Brent Mullins, Outsports
|
| |
|
|
