With time growing relatively short just over 650 days to go before the much-vaunted 2000 Olympic Games, many Sydneysiders must be wondering just what has turned so sour among the organisers charged with bringing their multi-billion pound Olympics to fruition.
In the past three years, political infighting at the key Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, or SOCOG, had led to the resignations of two presidents, a CEO and most spectacularly this week the board member known as "Mr Olympics".
Lawyer Mr Rod McGeogh, a lawyer, who masterminded Sydney's successful bid in 1993 against cities including Manchester, announced he was quitting the board after the internal leaking of damaging but later unsubstantiated allegations.
"We've got to stop the Olympics muckraking that's been going on," he told a press conference, while close to tears. "SOCOG is suffering, our international image in the Olympic community and everywhere must be suffering."
Even the Prime Minster, Mr John Howard, was moved to ask the board members to cease their "unseemly" squabbles in the national interest but without to no avail. It's It is the greatest crisis to engulf the preparations for the Games so far which, as well as being subject to cost overruns, have been caught up in controversies about fat-cat salaries for bureaucrats, excessive secrecy in its contracts, and payments to Aborigines.A recent opinion poll suggested almost 40 per cent of usually sports-mad Sydney residents would flee the city during the Games.
The latest row dispute erupted after a document was leaked detailing an A$8,000 fee Mr McGeogh's agent had demanded from a visiting American delegation for a briefing on the Olympics' progress. Mr McGeogh said the request was a mistake and blamed his departure on a campaign of vilification and destabilisation which included allegations he had profited from his involvement in Athens' successful bid for the 2004 Games.
The New South Wales Labor (stet Labor) government's Olympics Minister, Mr Michael Knight, who also is controversially SOCOG's president, was accused of being involved in the strategy to destabilise "Mr Olympics".
The state's Liberal opposition leader, Mr Peter Collins, described the attacks as politically inspired and an attempt by Labor to discredit Mr McGeogh. "This is a scurrilous and vicious attack on a man to whom we owe a great debt for winning us the Olympics in the first place.
"If anyone has a conflict of interest in SOCOG, it is Michael Knight, who made a grab for power wanting to be made both Olympics Minister and president of SOCOG," he said. It is a charge Mr Knight has denied but he admitted the incident has been damaging for SOCOG.
Australian Olympics Committee president Mr John Coates said he had spoken to International Olympics Committee chiefs in Lausanne this week and claimed their reaction to the row was "indifference".