On Your Marks…

In a few days - or even now if you're reading this late - the 2000 Olympics will be taking place in Sydney. For the first time, the internet is an integral part of Olympics coverage, thanks to the huge expansion in news and sports coverage on the net. Most of that coverage comes from long-established broadcast news and sports journalists, who are the people best suited to provide the kind of breaking 'as-it-happens' news. Of course you may have logged on to the internet in an effort to avoid the wall-to-wall Olympics coverage on your TV and radio... so I'm afraid you've logged on to the wrong site this week, buster.

Breaking news

In case you've been living in a cave for the last five years or so, it will come as no shock to you that the Olympics are in Sydney. Sydney is a large city in Australia. Australia is a large place south of everywhere except New Zealand. It has a time zone it shares with parts of Asia and parts of Oceania, which means that some of the broadcast coverage may be at inconvenient times of the day or night, depending on where you live. (Give the Aussies their due, they've pushed their clocks forward to summer time earlier than usual so as to close the gap with some of the rest of the world). The internet will, no doubt, be useful if you want to catch up on what happened while you were asleep - without having to wait for the next Olympics broadcast on TV or Radio.

So where to go? A good place to start would be Australia's ABC, which already has its Olympic news site up and running at http://www.abc.net.au/news/olympics/defa... . Needless to say, since they are one of the host broadcasters, they should be pretty much first with the news. They're looking after radio coverage while the Seven network is the host TV broadcaster, who managed to book themselves probably the most wanted URL in Australasia at the moment, http://olympics.com.au/ , for their coverage. You might also look in at the ABC's trans-Tasman cousins, TVNZ in New Zealand, who are also part of the host broadcasting team. Their website is at http://oneolympics.nzoom.com/ , but lets hope it's a bit speedier once the Games themselves are on - the day I checked, the site was two days out of date. Of course, the major world broadcasters have devoted an immense amount of time and talent to coverage of the Games. For my money, the coolest of these is the NBC site at http://www.nbcolympics.com/ , with groovy graphics and information that's easy to find and pleasant to browse through. The BBC site at http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport/hi/english/o... has a comprehensive roundup of the most up-to-date Olympics news. It's a bit on the staid side, but it's efficient and reliable. Very BBC. Also very BBC - in terms of being efficient but a little dull, is CNN"s Sports Illustrated at http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/olympic... . Of course, only time will tell which of these sites actually cuts the mustard and ends up really delivering up-to-the-minute Olympics news as it happens. (Personally, my money's on New Zealand's IRN/Newstalk ZB - partly because I work for them, but partly because I know their Sports coverage on the internet is very fast and very good. Check out their work at Telecom XTRA and the New Zealand Herald, both of which have real-time access to IRN's sports wire.

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