With the "American dream" now over, AUSTRALIA and its political capital SYDNEY are already preparing to organize the final Paralympic Games of the second millennium.

Many expectations and high hopes have already been raised "down under", following the relative fiasco, in many senses, that ATLANTA '96 turned out to be for everyone.

For the moment, the SPOC (Organizing Committee for the Paralympic Games in SYDNEY 2000) has offered the public opinion an example of common sense when they adopted BARCELONA '92 as their organizational point of reference, and not the capital of Georgia.

The Australians themselves experienced the problems that arose in Atlanta in person and have already started to put their ideas across and provide information on their project by way of informative stands and meetings with the leaders of various countries and federations.

MIXED SYSTEM

SYDNEY 2000 has created a corporation with the participation of both the public and private sectors for the organization of the Olympics and Paralympics. At this moment in time, therefore, we can already see a significant difference with respect to the competition in ATLANTA where, as you will surely remember, everything was left in the hands of the private sector.

There is another aspect that the Australian emissaries made a good note of while they were in America. We are referring to the attendance of the public, which was an absolute disaster there. In order to avoid a repetition of this, the SPOC is assessing the possibility of following the example of Barcelona, where entrance was only charged to the opening and closing ceremonies, access to the competition events being totally free.

There is little more we can say about SYDNEY 2000 at this stage, except the fact that the SPOC presented its corresponding "progress report" before the IPC leaders during the General Assembly held in ATLANTA. However, the really hot news hit the teletypes a few days after the Games ended: the president of the Organizing Committee for the SYDNEY 2000 Olympics presented his resignation to the Australian government due to the differences of opinion on administration matters. We hope this will not adversely affect the great expectations raised by the organizers of this forthcoming great Pacific sporting event.