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General British archer slightly cut 09/13/2000 By Rob Gloster / Associated Press
SYDNEY, Australia – British archer Simon Needham is sporting a slight nick on his chin, and it has nothing to do with an errant arrow. Instead, Needham was scraped when one bus struck another in the Olympic Village – the latest in a string of accidents that have bedeviled the Olympic transportation system in the days before the games begin. The accident in which Needham got nicked, which left one of the buses with a broken windshield, was one of two reported Tuesday on the Olympic bus network. The other involved a bus sideswiping a parked car. Needham, 40, a Royal Marines vehicle mechanic, was scraped when the bus he was riding to the archery venue rammed a parked bus that had just dropped off the Australian team returning from archery. ``It could be a nick from shaving. It's just as if you had run your fingernail over it,'' venue press manager Rowena Newcomen said of the mark on Needham's chin. ``It didn't even bleed.'' In the other accident, an Olympic bus on its way from the Media Village to the Main Press Center sideswiped a parked car. The accident held up the bus for 15 minutes, and the normal 30-minute trip took about an hour because the driver also had trouble with directions. There were other buses on which journalists had to direct drivers, about half of whom have been recruited from areas outside Sydney, to spots in the Olympic Park. ``As new drivers come on board, we take every step we can to make sure they know where they are,'' said Paul Willoughby, spokesman for the Olympic Roads and Transport Authority. ``But there always will be car drivers and bus drivers that get lost.'' There were more bus problems Wednesday. Buses shuttling athletes to various training areas were running late Wednesday, leaving every 30-45 minutes or so instead of the usual 10-15 minute interval, according to Graham Cassidy, spokesman for Olympics Minister Michael Knight. He couldn't say what the problem was but said the situation was expected to return to normal later in the day. The biggest previous test for Sydney transit was in 1995 when 900 buses were used during a visit by Pope John Paul II. For the Olympics, there will be 3,500 buses on the road during peak periods. Trains also will be crowded. Olympic visitors will push the number of passenger trips on the CityRail network from the normal level of 14 million to about 34 million during the 19-day Olympic period. Parking in the Sydney business district was banned beginning Wednesday and an Olympic train schedule went into effect, with officials promising a train running into Olympic Park station every seven to eight minutes between early morning and late night. The start of the new train service did not go smoothly, however. CityRail canceled three trains in the first hour of its Olympic timetable – leaving 60 commuters stranded for more than an hour early Wednesday morning (Tuesday afternoon EDT) at Sydney's Central Station. The Sydney Olympic transportation system has seen some notable successes, such as a nearly flawless performance in taking 81,000 people to an opening ceremony dress rehearsal Saturday. But there also have been some big goofs. One of the most attention-getting breakdowns took place last weekend, when IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch canceled a tour of the International Broadcast Center because a bus failed to show at his hotel. Willoughby said he knows there will be comparisons to the 1996 Atlanta Games, which were plagued by transportation problems. ``It's impossible to run a transportation system of this magnitude without some glitches,'' he said. ``I think it's inevitable people will compare one host city with another. But comparisons to Atlanta are limited. Sydney has quite a different transport system than Atlanta.'' |
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Track star 
1996
swimming gold medalist Ryan Berube 
