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"Watching" the triathlon Following the race is almost as tough as competing
SYDNEY, Australia -- The triathlon is supposed to be a grueling event. Apparently, it's too much of three good things: a swim in the bay, a bike down the path and a jog up the street. My belief: Exercise is best in moderation. No need complicating a workout with that many changes of clothes. Anyway, agreed, the competition is tough. But I'm here to tell you it's not so easy to watch, either. Listen to my story: I set out for the men's Olympic event Sunday morning and quickly found myself trapped inside the course, ringed entirely by the cycling and running circuits. This was a problem in that I didn't feel I needed 2 1/2 hours to get a feel for the thing. That is, I had planned to leave a little shy of the medal presentation.
But now I was stuck. So I found a place along the bay overlooking the swim portion, reclining easily against some sort of banyan tree. The vista was postcard quality, with the Opera House, the actual start and finish point, just to my left. It suddenly occurred to me that the design had been cribbed from nature -- those structures were actually clams set on their ends, sectioned, of course. In my travelogue reading, I don't believe anybody else had come up with that observation. The swimmers sprang from a platform just under the Opera House, and it wasn't too long until they'd churned out of my sight. I noticed there were about nine eras worth of seafaring history crowding the course for a view. Besides the usual pleasure crafts there were two what I would call pirate ships milling about. A catamaran, the yellow-and-green ferries, a giant tanker nursed along by two little tugs. Have you ever noticed how a tanker ... "And now the athletes are transitioning ..." Just like that the event shifted to the cycling phase, and I had to leave my seat. I walked to another vantage point, realizing my prison was actually the Royal Botanic Gardens. I wandered a bit -- I was transitioning as well -- and noticed Australia really is different. Not one sugar maple. Lots of strange trees with roots dropping from limbs. You'd look twice, too. But that's another postcard. So, duty-bound, I crowded next to a path inside the park -- opposite the art museum, which curiously had the names of artists carved into the sandstone -- and noticed further that a pack of cyclists were winding through about every three minutes. Or they may have been different packs of cyclists winding through every nine minutes. Hard to tell. I resolved to let them sort it out, as they like to say here (another thing they like to say is, "We copped a lot of stick" -- but, like those strange trees, that's another story), and headed off to the other side of the park to watch them bike on the return. And there was a sort of a meadow, a picnic area you might say, with hundreds of fans like me sprawled on the grass. The morning sun was warm, the walk had been long ... "The Frenchman is in the lead! The Frenchman ..." Had the gardens not been wired for sound I'm sure I could have sprawled much longer. But I felt I should sample the running part as well, so I transitioned a little farther until I had a glimpse of Macquarie Street, the park's boundary and a main downtown route. I never did see the Frenchman, or very many runners at all. By now, it was hard to tell who was in first place or in last. They were all running hard, in my opinion, and the 150,000 who had showed up to watch were screaming, "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie ... Oy, Oy, Oy!" indiscriminately. I did find some shade along the route in the courtyard of the Sydney Hospital, an old building by Australian standards, all sandstone with green filigree iron work and a fountain with a yellow pelican carved on it. The structure seemed vaguely colonial and I had no trouble imagining this city, all skyscrapers and Opera Houses now, at its British development, overrun with convicts ... "Whitfield has passed the German! Whitfield will win ..." Basically, I had missed it all. There's no sense kidding you. I hadn't seen anything. The morning had been pleasant but I couldn't argue that I had had an Olympic experience. One problem was that it was too crowded; just getting to the train and back to my hotel, where I might start writing, was a chore in itself. All those people bumped me along until I was off course and headed directly for The Rocks, an historic and well-appointed district not in the least bit on my way back to work. It had been just that kind of day and -- Good Lord! -- there's a pub ... Sports Illustrated senior writer Richard Hoffer is in Sydney covering the Games for the magazine and CNNSI.com. Check back daily to read Hoffer's behind-the-scenes reports from Down Under.
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