Summer Games

SYDNEY, Australia - The people running the 2000 Summer Olympics have set a modest goal for their event, at least in their public pronouncements. They just want to be "better than Atlanta." Let's see, better than sweltering heat and humidity, a fatal bombing incident, widespread transportation breakdowns and the overall ambience of a truck stop. Think they can do it? Sydney is coming after the Olympic version of the car that was always in the shop, the dog who always messed on the carpet, the opening-act comedian who got hooted.

Got the barbecue fired up? Dogs and burgers at the ready? Cooler packed with ice and cold drinks?Sure, you're all set for Labor Day.So now is the perfect time to begin thinking about -- snow. And ice. Not the cube-kind that you put into your drinks, the flat-kind that people zip around on, wearing funny shoes with blades on the bottom.I'm talking Olympics. Winter Olympics.That's right, the games are only a few months off; six, to be exact.Funny -- seems like only last year . . .It was only last year that Albertville, France, was host to the Winter Olympic Games.

Although the motive for yesterday's bombings in London is not clear, one thing is: The financial and emotional repercussions are likely to be felt by every city that has been awarded the Olympics. The attack on London, the winner of the 2012 Summer Games, turned jubilation into shock and sorrow. It also brought a quick response from the International Olympic Committee. "It wasn't an attack against the Games," IOC President Jacques Rogge said. "Cities like London, Paris, New York all face these kind of risks, and remember what happened in Moscow and Madrid.

TURIN, Italy -- Chris Witty will carry the United States flag into the stadium during the opening ceremony of the Olympics tonight, an honor symbolic of a greater struggle than chasing gold medals throughout the world. She can talk about it now. An abusive predator who stole her innocence, disguised in the kindly embrace of a neighbor. He crawled into her life when she was 4 and growing up in West Allis, Wis. The memory lingers. "I remember his smell," Witty said dispassionately, reflecting years of work with a therapist.

BEIJING -- The interior of the metallic and shiny Beijing Organizing Committee office building feels torn from a futuristic science fiction movie. In here, there's one set of numbers that everyone seems to know: 102-93-63. You would think that those numbers were a code, a confidential string of digits that perhaps unlocks a room, safe or state secret. Though it's not quite that clandestine, make no mistakes, it is a code of sorts. The final medal tally at the 2004 Summer Games: United States 102, Russia 93, China, 63. Depending on what you choose to believe or to whom you choose to listen, those numbers are a driving force behind the Summer Games, as China looks to flex its political and economic muscle on a global sporting stage.

The International Olympic Committee voted, in the end, to hold the Summer Games of 2000 in winter. It opted for stability over political anxiety. It succumbed to infrastructure in place rather than grandiose building plans.The IOC chose a favored small country that hosted the games in 1956 rather than the most populous country on earth or the first Islamic host. The IOC made the safe choice. It decided that the Games are for the athletes and not for statements about grand historical development.

ATHENS - Tonight, the sports world lights the candle for a quadrennial celebration of all things good and pure. The speeches will laud peace and brotherhood. Television cameras will show shining, happy faces. Tomorrow, the real world intrudes. If the Summer Games of 2004 follow the all-too-familiar pattern of Olympics past, there will be ugliness: an athlete will cheat, a judge will err, money will change hands. Any of the above. All of the above. But almost certainly we will not be able to escape these Games with none of the above.

If the Olympics come to Baltimore in 2008, you can make $10,000 in two weeks subletting your house to a visiting potentate.As long as you're willing to build a chicken-wire pen in the back yard to house his goats.If the Olympics come to Baltimore in 2008, you can go for the gold on behalf of your country -- as a duckpin bowler.Honest, hon.The International Olympic Committee usually allows one "local" sport onto the docket at each Olympics as a demonstration event, such as curling in Calgary and ballroom dancing in Sydney, Australia.

Historians and those who measure time may quibble over whether the just-concluded Winter Olympics are the last Games of the millennium, but, from a television standpoint, the event is about to enter a new era.That's because, starting with the Summer Games of 2000 in Sydney, Australia, NBC will take over telecast control of the Olympics -- winter and summer -- through 2008. And right off the bat, NBC executives will be confronted with the decision of whether, in the wake of CBS' diminished ratings return for the just-completed Nagano Games, to shake up the tried and true formula of presenting the Olympics to an American television audience.

For the world's greatest athletes, the final Olympic event will not be held on a field of play. Instead, it will occur behind closed doors.It is called a drug test.Four years after Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for an anabolic steroid and was stripped of a 100-meter gold medal, the Olympic cops are back on the beat, ready to flag down potential drug abusers at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain.The weapons: beakers, sealed specimen bottles, and state-of-the-art labs.