Green and gold Games

Dave Hadfield on the Sydney Olympic organisers' concern for the environment

When the time comes soon for Sydney to select its Olympic mascot, it might be tempted to eschew the obvious kangaroos and koalas in favour of a humble frog.

With five years to go before the event, the city is discovering that staging the games is not as easy as falling off a log. The determination of a rare breed of amphibian to cling to its habitat, in fact, is just one of the environmental considerations complicating preparations for the millennium Olympics, making the frog a highly suitable symbol.

A vast hole in the ground at Homebush - variously a brick pit and a set for a Mad Max movie in its previous lives - had been earmarked for the baseball and tennis facilities for the 2000 games. That was before the green and golden bell frog was discovered living in the shallow pools at the bottom of the pit.

It might seem an uneven contest - a hundred puny amphibians versus the multi-billion-dollar juggernaut that is Sydney 2000. But the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (Socog) had to give way and the baseball and tennis will be held elsewhere; game, set and match to the frogs.

There have been other compromises forced on Sydney. Areas of woodland which are home to 125 species of birds will have to be preserved; it is part of the price of a Games which has nailed its colours to the environmental mast in a city where the green lobby is vociferous.

The environmental benefits of the Games were a major selling point in Sydney's narrow victory over Beijing in the bidding process. Sydney does not have many scabrous, devastated wastelands, but Homebush is one of them. Its unglamorous history includes being used for the city abattoirs, brickworks, armament factories and all manner of illicit dumping.

The legacy is one of the most polluted patches of land in the Southern hemisphere - some of it - not the Olympic site itself - riddled with dioxins. The effect of the Games will be to transform the ugliest of backwaters into something in keeping with the rest of a beautiful city.

Homebush, 10 miles up the Parramatta River from the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, will be changed from a polluted swamp into an area Sydney people will want to visit and use well into the next century.

The Aquatic Centre was already built, regardless of the success or otherwise of the bid, and has now attracted almost a million visitors and is known as "The Beach of the West" - providing the poorer half of the city with the dip the privileged east takes for granted.

The main stadium, with a minimum of 80,000 seats, will be used after the Games for at least one code of football, most likely for rugby league Tests and finals. The village for 15,000 athletes - the first time that competitors in all sports have been housed on one site - will be recycled into 6,000 units of what, by Sydney standards, will be affordable housing.

The pounds 500m American television deal with NBC last week has gone a long way to ensuring that these will be wealthy games. Sydney's unmatched setting ensures that, while there will be vigilant lobbies to placate, they will also be visually stunning. The reclaimed docks of Darling Harbour will be the backdrop for most of the sports not at Homebush, while the city's greatest asset - Sydney Harbour - will be used for sailing and, worryingly for those with long memories, the swimming leg of the triathlon.

Socog are adamant there are no sharks in the harbour these days, but others are not so sure and harbour beaches are still protected with shark nets. "But there won't be any problems with sharks," insists the committee's PR manager, Simon Balderstone. "And I'm pretty relaxed about the frogs as well."