More than two decades after Sydney staged what is still regarded as one of the greatest ever Olympic Games, one of the people responsible for its most memorable moments has a warning for Brisbane.
David Atkins, a driving force behind the Sydney 2000 Olympic ceremonies and a veteran of major global events from Vancouver to the Middle East, said the biggest danger facing the city’s Olympic plans is not overspending, but stripping ambition from them before construction has even begun.
“Don’t penny-pinch at this stage. You’ll eventually have to penny-pinch anyway, but don’t do it now,” he said.
“There’ll be times when cost savings will have to be made, and it’s at that point that you need to get the knife out, but don’t start killing the ideas at the beginning.”
Atkins, the founder of international events and ceremonies firm DAE Global, said creatives should be involved in the design process for the planned Brisbane Stadium at Victoria Park before any shovel enters the ground.
At Sydney 2000, he said, organisers had concepts for the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies in mind as the stadium at Homebush was designed.
“There was an understanding of certain requirements creatively that could be built into the stadium as part of its infrastructure that allowed things that became iconic to happen – it would have been either not possible or incredibly expensive to retrofit,” he said.
As an example, Atkins points to the moment when Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic flame as a waterfall came down through the northern stand.
“The reason we could do that was that when the stadium was being built, the catchment from the roof was all funnelled down into tanks underneath that stand,” he said.
“At the time there were questions about that expense, but it was literally half what it would have cost as part of the ceremony’s budget.”
Of course, even with the best long-term planning, things had a tendency not to go fully to plan. Atkins – along with billions across the globe – watched on in horror as the Sydney Olympic cauldron froze on its journey to its perch high above the stadium.
“It was a heart-stopping moment – I remember being literally on my knees in the control room when that happened,” he said.
“[Stage director] Richard Wherrett and I had run that segment probably 50 times over the course of the final rehearsals. We were there well into the early hours of the morning almost every night, just running it up and down, up and down, up and down, and we never had this issue.
“And it happened on the night. It was pretty terrifying.”
The technical glitch, caused by a malfunctioning limit switch, left the flame suspended midair and almost made some unwelcome history.
“We came within very close measure to being one of the few countries that actually extinguished the flame rather than igniting it,” Atkins said.
He said the cauldron had an onboard gas cylinder with enough gas for eight minutes, and an expected journey time of just three minutes.
“But, of course, we hadn’t planned on 3½ minutes of it not moving at all,” he said. “So as that flame went up, if you’re watching closely, you can see the flame lower as it started to run out of gas.”
It was something Atkins could laugh about now, but he said it showed how important risk mitigation was for an Olympic-scale event.
As for 2032, Atkins said there was one requirement for the Olympic ceremonies – to have a “Brisbane heartbeat”.
“There are some unique things, not only about Brisbane, but about Queensland. And there’s a particular Queensland approach, too,” he said.
“All those things need to be brought to bear on the process, and I think there’s plenty of opportunity to capitalise on those and to bring those to life culturally.”
So far, he said, Brisbane appeared to be heading in the right direction.
“Looking at other aspects of [the stadium], like a museum for example and making sure that it has a life beyond a track and field stadium, is really critical,” he said.
“There’s always a resistance to spending extra money – and these things are expensive – but in the fullness of time, I don’t think anyone, certainly not the state government and certainly not anyone who funded [Sydney 2000] looks back on it and goes, ‘you know, we shouldn’t have done that’.
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