Field Hockey Canada
2000 OLYMPIC GAMES

October 15

Final Olympic Team Update, by Andrew Griffiths Hello from Toronto, Canada! This is my last olympic message - I wanted to put a final note out to close this thing off. I thought I'd wait to send this until some of the Olympic fanfare, fervour, fever had died down. This takes a while, especially in Australia, where I stayed for a week after the Games. The tide of backslapping and congratulations for the "best Games ever" was still going strong when I left Sydney on Wednesday. The prevailing message in the media, and from many Australians that I spoke to, was, "We proved ourselves to the world". A coming-of-age message. The Aussies feel that they have finally earned the world's respect. They have just run the best-ever version of the world's biggest event. "We will no longer be seen as a land of convicts and crocodiles" reads one newspaper column! Although a little overwhelming, the praise is well deserved - Sydney did an excellent job of hosting the games, making an enormous coordination of planning and work look easy. And the Australian people made it great. I am sitting here in Toronto now thinking back on the whole experience. It is good to be back to a normal life again, although now the days of being a celebrity and signing autographs are over and we have to pay to take the subway, line up to get into bars, and pay for food again... The Competition The games did not go the way our team had hoped, or the way we had expected. This was a huge disappointment for us - there is no disguising that - after spending so much time, work and emotion on the journey with this team. However, the experience was incredible. And indelible. Playing on that beautiful turf in the sunshine, in front of 15,000 hockey fans, in a stadium surrounded by other venues where the world's best athletes were competing, and much of the world tuned in to it all. What a powerful feeling. A place to feel all the heights and depths of the emotional scale. The most positive thing I can say in the wake of our 10th place finish is that our team stayed together throughout. There was no finger-pointing, no blame assigned, no bitterness amongst the group. Only disappointment that we didn't get the results that we felt we deserved. It says a lot about the strength of our team, and that will stay with me longer than the final placing. Last thing - thank you to those of you who sent messages during the games!

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