Sydney comes down from Games high

Today is Labour Day holiday in Sydney, no small mercy for a city about to plunge into an Olympian-sized hangover.

It is the second day of the Australian Jockey Club's spring carnival at Randwick where, if they present their identification, Olympic volunteers, athletes and officials will be admitted free. Bets are extra.

The beaches will almost certainly be packed as the run of exceptional weather - like the Games, record-breaking - spills into the new week and flushes the sea clean of the bacterial contamination that lent a small touch of the real world to life in Olympic Sydney.

Tens of thousands of blinds will be drawn well into the morning.

Tomorrow, the city will party again, with a ticker-tape parade for Australia's gold-lined Olympic team, and once more on Thursday for a similar celebration for the almost 50,000 volunteers who ensured that the Games not only worked, but were welcoming.

The real world will start coming home today at Sydney Airport and the roads leading to it as the rush of departing visitors crashes against the wave of returning Sydneysiders who fled the city for the extended three-week school holidays.

And it will thump home tomorrow, the first working day after October 1, when the first quarterly instalment of the GST introduced in July falls due for many small city businesses, whose cashflow was hammered during the Games.

The roads will again be snarled with nose-to-tail rush hours as cars return to streets that had been almost eerily empty.

And on Wednesday Australia will learn if the combination of a collapsing dollar, soaring credit and a burgeoning trade deficit will prompt the Reserve Bank to crank up interest rates by a further 0.25 per cent.

But for two weeks Sydney was the greatest city in the world, humming with a vibrancy and humour that flowed out from Olympic Park and zinged through streets filled with music and people who smiled and went out of their way to help.

The Olympics were Australia at its best, which is very, very good.

The weather helped, with the worst of the storms and rain of the second week at night, and temperatures soaring to a peak of almost 35 degrees on Friday, a 35-year record for September.

Central city streets were glowing, with a small army of about 500 cleaners specially hired for the duration, and a rejuvenation that laid 45,000m of granite paving, planted 1400 new trees and 100,000 blooming plants downtown, brushed up the CBD from Martin Place to Chinatown and even installed automated dunnies.

For all the accidents, derailments and delays in the months before the Games, the trains ran on time, almost flawlessly moving well over 1 million people a day and every morning hauling the population of Dunedin to Olympic Park.

Downtown traffic disappeared as commuters left their cars at home: business at inner-city car parks was down by as much as 80 per cent.

The Games also gave Australia a whole new galaxy of stars - giants such as swimmer Ian Thorpe and Cathy Freeman grew even larger, while others no one previously knew existed, such as tae kwon do gold medallist Lauren Burns and long-jumper Jai Taurima, are the new toasts of the town.

Svelt Russian-born pole-vaulter Tatiana Grigorieva has already been photographed clad only in panties on her way to a predicted second superstardom in modelling.

The CD of the opening ceremony sold 100,000 copies in its first week, went double platinum in the second and raced up to number one on the charts.

The Games gave Australia an estimated economic boost of $A6.5 billion

And, possibly best of all, Sydney will not be left with the kind of huge debt that has burdened other host cities for years after the event.

The Games were fully paid for within the state budget without borrowing, and any lingering doubts have been erased by windfall gains from the nosediving dollar.

But now back to reality.

Some of it will be welcomed - restaurant and beer prices back down to pre-Games levels, for example.

But the ugly news hidden by Olympic headlines is about to erupt again.

Sky-high petrol prices threaten to spark blockades and go-slows by truck-drivers across New South Wales.

The ailing dollar and sharemarket, the return of vitriolic politics.

The glow from Cathy Freeman's gold medal and the talk of reconciliation is already fading, and will inevitably fade further under the weight of politics and disadvantage.

The trains will be back to normal, with freight trains running again. Passenger services diverted from Olympic routes, and the bonuses and extra payments for drivers and guards, will end.

Once, says state Premier Bob Carr, is enough.

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