With all eyes converging on Sydney for the 2000 Olympics the technology to run it will be put to the test. David Hellaby investigates.
It is 40 years since computers were used to analyse
With all eyes converging on Sydney for the 2000 Olympics the technology to run it will be put to the test. David Hellaby investigates.
It is 40 years since computers were used to analyse results at an Olympic event - the Squaw Valley Winter Games. It is 20 years since the Russians became the first Olympic hosts to deploy mobile satellite ground stations, and 16 years since a summer games was held in a city - Los Angeles - with a mobile phone network. And it is just four years since the first official Olympic Web site went online - the first unofficial site was started two years earlier in 1994 by a group of students who used it for daily postings of photos from the Lillehammer Winter Olympics.
Now Sydney is staging the first totally digital Games. Everything from the communications equipment, precision timepieces and photo finish equipment to the giant screens used in the main stadium, is digitised.
When more than 10,000 athletes from 200 countries come together to compete in 300 medal events at 39 different competition venues - some of them 3,500 kilometres apart - logistical challenges abound. Complex systems had to be developed to handle registration, accreditation, transportation management, and the collection and distribution of real time results.
Apart from the athletes there are another 250,000 officials, media, broadcasters, coaches and volunteers who have to be kept in the communications loop and an international audience of 3.5 billion that is demanding instant information whether it be on radio, television or over the Internet.
As a result the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games has one of the largest, most complex information technology infrastructures ever built to manage and distribute information to the world. IBM has provided it in conjunction with several other companies and the cost is astronomical - the equivalent of running a Fortune 500 corporation - and for that reason this will be IBM's last Olympics as a major sponsor. It can no longer justify the cost.
While IBM has created the IT infrastructure, Telstra has created a communications network capable of coping with data and voice traffic volumes many times that of anything that has been seen in Australia before.
To add to the problems of those responsible for providing and managing the necessary infrastructure, the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) decided that these should be the greenest games ever held. That meant everything possible should be recyclable from paper and printer toner cartridges to the equipment itself.