ABSTRACT
The Games of the XXVII Olympiad were staged in Sydney between 15 September and 1October 2000. In total, 10,651 athletes from nearly 200 countries competed in 300 events across twenty-eight sports. Sydney 2000 marked only the second time an Australian city had hosted the Summer Olympics, and the second time the Games had been held in the southern hemisphere. It also celebrated 100 years of women’s participation in the modern Olympic Games, as well as the debut of two new sports, taekwondo and the triathlon. The total cost of staging the Games has been estimated at A$6.6 billion (Davidson and McNeill, 2012), of which approximately two-thirds were paid for by the public sector, representing 0.6 per cent of the country’s GDP in 1990-2000 (Cashman, 2006).
