Leaderboard

Just scrap separate male and female events and have it mixed... equal pay, equal opportunities, equal rules and equal sports = none of this issue.

Since Sydney’s Allianz got brought up… LOL! More a Sydney thing. The Allianz upgrade was part of a big stadium package announced by a previous State government that would have also included knocking down and rebuilding the even-younger Olympic stadium and a few other big suburban stadium upgrades like Parramatta Stadium. It didn’t go over as popular and as much a vote winner as they had hoped. After an outcry, the Olympic stadium rebuild was scrapped in favour of some upgrading, and the suburban stadiums were put on an indefinite back burner (Parramatta still happening, and I think Penrith’s getting a new one). Allianz survived because the NRL (Rugby League) and the ARU (Rugby Union) have the financial and political clout in NSW to ensure they get more bells and whistles than the 1988-vintage stadium offered. That’s a bit misleading, including the satellite image. A large portion of the immediate surrounds are two large ground level car parks that could easily be consolidated underground or a single multi-story facility and Driver Ave is more an access road to the stadiums and the car parks than a major thoroughfare. The UTS building is just a small sub-campus, probably sports medicine. The area itself is also just the one corner - the three stadium zone - of a much, much larger parkland belt. The Moore Park parklands, immediately adjacent across Driver Avenue are frequently partly used as overflow cark parking for major events. The Moore Park parkland itself extends across to a golf course, the ES Marks athletics field, then Centennial Park and on to Randwick Racecourse. It’s actually quite a vast green belt. The green belt itself was bordered by a lot of aging industrial-type zones that in recent years have buen redeveloped as large medium-to-high density apartment developments (ie: Meriton-ised) that would have been perfect for, say, an Olympic Village development. This would have been the centrepiece of a 1996 games if Sydney had, (a) won the domestic bid and (b) gone on to win the IOC bid. As a lifelong inner city Sydneysider myself, I’m a little disappointed we didn’t go the same path for 2000 - it would have been a more city-centric games closer to more postcard picturesque Sydney. Homebush was more a political savvy choice to provide a precinct closer to the sprawling western suburbs population bubble. You forgot Rugby Union (though I accept you southerners often forget the difference between Union and League) - it’s the home of the NSW Waratahs and the ARU headquarters are next door. The NRL, as far as I know, still base themselves in Philip Street in the CBD.

I have to confess, I do get a bit of schadenfreude watching the debacle Bach ravels himself into - maybe he’ll retire early to foist the mess onto his successor. But it’s so typically Bach to play the fence sitter and still manage to piss off everyone in the process. He provokes the west into publically labelling him Russia’s pet, while his Moscow mates still accuse him of being a NATO puppet. Just let your balls drop Thomas, and you might actually be able to leave the job with some semblance of a legacy. Meanwhile, it’s the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) who are emerging as the rogue mavericks of the Olympic movement. It’s them (and the AFC in football) that are playing kissy-kissy with Vlad now he’s found himself with no friends in Europe bar Lukashenkostan. And that shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s stuffed full of potential mates - China, Iran, the Stans - even Saudi Arabia, the “ally” the West is embarrassed to acknowledge and which only pays lip service to the West because it hates Iran more. And cash counts in the OCA - surely the only continental Olympic council where petro dollars can buy the Winter Asiad for the world’s most pre-eminent hot desert fiefdom. I’m glad Oz and NZ seem to have deleted the OCA off its Tinder contacts.