Driver takes a wrong turn, boxing gets delayed

Sydney: The Olympic boxing programme was delayed on Monday when a bus got lost taking contestants to their bouts and heavy traffic held up a softball game as Sydney's transport system hit its first woes since the start of the Games.

Monday was the first major test of the much scrutinised network for the 17-day Games as road and rail commuters returned to work after the weekend."We left the Village and he (the driver) turned left instead of going past all the venues and we started heading towards Penrith," west of Sydney, said Australian boxing team manager Peter Rogers, who was on the bus.

The problem meant the start of the afternoon programme in downtown Sydney's Darling Harbour had to be put back 30 minutes since fighters for the first two bouts were on the bus.

A traffic jam on a motorway out to western areas of Sydney held up the start of a preliminary women's match between Japan and China at the Blacktown Softball Centre for around an hour after the Japanese team got caught up in the tailback.

The coach of China's women's softball team said the delay had fazed the players, who went down to Japan 1-3. "It had a definite impact on us psychologically," coach Liu Yaming said. "I would have thought that as an Olympic Games things would have been organised in a very orderly manner."

Liz Smylie, spokeswoman for the Sydney Games Organising committee, SOCOG, said organisers were doing their best to avoid problems, though with traffic they were sometimes inevitable. "Even though they were delayed, the bottom line is that they got there and they competed," she said of the softball players.

Lost, late, livid

Games organisers had to take emergency action before the start of the Olympics last Friday to improve shuttle bus services for athletes, officials and the media and try to avoid a repeat of the transport chaos that marred the 1996 Atlanta Games.

They drafted in more scheduling experts, recruited extra drivers, including some from the Army, and brought in volunteer navigators after drivers hired from out of town got lost on Olympic routes and some athletes missed training sessions.

Sydney's Olympic Rail and Transport Authority also had to raise wages for the 5,000 drivers after several walked off the job, complaining of poor conditions.

ORTA said the transport system had generally coped well with Monday morning's crush of commuters and Olympic spectators, many of them heading out west to watch the three-day equestrian event.

"Based on the movement of competitors, spectators and sightseers in the first 2- days of the Games we're very pleased, but we're still saying that the challenge is yet to come," said ORTA spokesman Wayne Geddes.

He said the crunch would come on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with 500,000 people expected to flood to Sydney's main Olympic Park complex by rail on each of those days.

International Amateur Boxing Association vice-president Arthur Tunstall said mix-ups with Olympic transport were inevitable because Games organisers invariably drafted in bus drivers from "hundreds of miles away"."I got lost five times in Rome (in 1960) even with a police escort," he said.



(c) Reuters Limited.