More volleys yet in Bondi beach battle

By PETER CALDER

Of all the events that have interloped into the Olympic programme in the modern era, expanding the competition into a 31-sport extravaganza, beach volleyball has to be the weirdest.

Muscled jocks in baggy shorts, lissom women in pastel bikinis just don't seem to embody the acme of athletic prowess. They just look like they're having fun. It's more games than Olympic and it's hard to imagine what Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, would have made of it all.

Beach volleyball first appeared on the programme at the previous games in the profoundly inland city of Atlanta, Georgia, but this year it's happening at the beach - and it's a beach close to the hearts of many New Zealanders who have made the pilgrimage across the Ditch.

Thick with New Zealanders, Bondi became known as an Auckland suburb and, while there are still Kiwi vowels to be heard along the promenade and conspicuously Maori faces to be seen, it's no longer compulsory for Kiwis to live there.

A jewel among urban beaches - particularly since the sewage outfall was moved several kilometres offshore - Bondi yesterday was drenched in 20 deg sunshine and littered with sunseekers.

Well, most of it was. Seven hectares of it sits behind hurricane fences topped with barbed wire, behind which looms the Olympics' instant stadium, a 10,000-seat affair imported from Switzerland and bolted together next to the pavilion. Seen against its surroundings - the elegant Australian deco buildings lining the promenade and the modest low-rises clustered on the headlands - it is supremely out of scale. When it is dismantled and carted away (the last trace is scheduled to be gone by the end of October) it will have been there only six months. But at least some of the locals will be glad to see the last of it.

"It's an ugly-looking thing," says George the bus driver as we sweep down the hill and the stadium leaps into view. "All scaffolding and nothing else. They could have done better than that."

George, a Bondi resident for 13 years, expresses his disgust with a mild shrug, but the opposition has been more heated. Kevin St Alder, the spokesman for the pressure group Bondi Olympic Watch, says the group gathered 12,000 signatures against the development.

He says it constitutes the defacement of a Sydney icon and will put enormous pressure on a community served by narrow access roads.

He says the volleyball would have been better held at Maroubra, three beaches further south, which has better access and a larger sand area.

Only days before competition starts, and even as venue staff rake the sand flat on the courts between practice sessions, stadium opponents have still not given up the fight.

On Thursday, when the world's cameras watch the Olympic flame carried across the sand, Mr St Alder and his supporters assembled on the headland are planning a bright protest they are calling "a sea of mirrors."

"Every time they pan across the beach looking for their photo opportunity we'll be highlighting the community concerns by reflecting the sun into their lenses."

The enormous impact on the compact and easygoing community will be offset by $A1 million ($1.34 million) in improvements to the fabulous but decayed Edwardian pavilion on the beachfront. A lift has been installed and the facade - though not the back - has been painted. The press manager at the venue, Julian Kerr, says that Socog "spent its money where the Waverley Council asked us to" but Mr St Alder dismisses the improvements as "a disabled lift that had to be installed anyway and a bit of paint slapped on."

"We want full restoration of a heritage-listed building so at least there's some sort of lasting legacy for the community."

Out on the beach, the bathers didn't seem so worried. Steve Watson, a nightclub worker who regularly spends his days on the sand, says a few people "got hassled about it but it doesn't worry me."

"If people want the Olympics, they've got to be prepared to take it on the chin."