The "Greatest Show on Earth" is back and badly in need of an image makeover.

The last Olympic Games of the 20th century could revitalize the event or plunge it further into discredit with its arrival in one of the world's most youthful, energetic, reckless and inexperienced of international cities.

Sydney won the right to host the Games of the XXVII Olympiad in 1993 on the promise that Australia would deliver a fresh face to the Olympic movement, clean up corruption and drugs, and put on a "Green Games."

These were all sweet sounds to an International Olympic Committee beginning to feel the pressure of scandal and an outcry over commercialism.

But, just as the IOC has been clobbered by revelations of freeloading, backhanders and a lack of accountability in the years since, so, too, has Sydney's image taken a battering. News has leaked out of disorganization, protests, inducements made to win votes and favors offered to the rich that threaten the Australian notion of a "fair go" for all.

However, the Olympics are said to have a Teflon-coated appeal. All the complaints could end Friday when the balloons go up and the flame is lit to herald the opening of 16 days of endorphin-charged competition and entertainment pitting athletes from 199 of the world's nations and territories against each other in the sporting equivalent of war.

That analogy won't sit well with either IOC supremo Juan Antonio Samaranch or U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Both men would like us to think the Olympics stand for world peace and bring warring nations together. They have asked all those presently involved in armed struggle across the globe to put down their weapons for the duration of the Games and observe an "Olympic truce."

A billion-dollar extravaganza

In return, the world is offering a $1.5 billion extravaganza with 10,200 athletes testing the bounds of humanity's physical excellence in 300 different events.

It will be watched by thousands of international visitors and 17,000 members of the media will feed countless kilometers of copy around the globe and a 3,200-hour television feast to 3.7 billion of the world's 6 billion-strong population.

It will be big business, reaping millions for some athletes who take home gold medals, more for multinational sponsors expecting our inspiration to find its expression in consumerism, and even more for the IOC.

It will also be a test of national strength. The United States, the undisputed Olympic superpower, faces a challenge from Australia for supremacy in the pool. An ailing Russia will try to hold on to its lead over Germany and France, and China aims to improve on its fifth position last time round to help boost its bid for the 2008 Olympics.

Japan will also be hoping to make an impression as it lobbies on behalf of Osaka for the same Olympics. Japan will also be hoping to build on its successes at the Nagano Winter Games in 1998 and to erase memories of its team's miserable performance in Atlanta.

Ryoko "Yawara-chan" Tamura will once again be aiming for that elusive Olympic gold on the judo mat, Naoko Takahashi will lead the nation's strongest field in the women's marathon and the swimming team aims to power onto the winners podium it could not reach four years ago.

There will be titans of sport in every field, and triumph or tragedy decided by fractions of a second.

America's Marion Jones is going for five golds, Maurice Greene wants to prove he is the greatest-ever sprinter, Cuban high jumper Javier Sotomayor will endure the jeers of the crowd for his positive test for cocaine, and Australia's Cathy Freeman will carry the hopes of the host nation.

Sydney: a hussy with a heart

It will all happen with a distinctly Australian flavor, in a city founded on crooks and corrupt police.

Sydney makes much of the sweeping views of its famous harbor, the grand majesty of its harbor bridge and the architectural genius of the Opera House.

All of that is true, but the fact of the matter is that Sydney is a hussy at heart -- and kind of proud of it. She will love and abandon you, thrill and indulge you, steal the last coin from your pocket and leave you savoring the memory, with no regrets.

The city started life on Jan. 26, 1788, with the arrival of 1,500 Europeans -- half of them convicts -- to build a penal colony for the overflow from England's crowded prisons. The police wound up paid in salt and rum, a currency that bred corruption.

Rascal spirit still runs close to the surface in Sydney. "Waltzing Matilda," a song about a sheep thief, is the de facto national anthem and gets a going over at the Opening Ceremony. Visitors will not see many sheep thieves, but taxi drivers will slug them a 10 percent surcharge, restaurants threaten to toss them out of their chairs after an hour to make way for other customers and Olympic caterers aim to empty their pockets with exorbitantly priced junk food.

The battle for the Games was equally cheeky. Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates admitted last year that he promised two IOC delegates $35,000 each for their national Olympic committees the night before the IOC voted for Sydney.

Then Australian IOC member Kevan Gosper, a candidate to take over from Samaranch, let his daughter run the first leg of the torch relay, at the last minute bumping down a young Australian girl of Greek heritage who had flown to Athens expecting the honor.

The local organizing committee has been the scene of vicious bloodletting that would have made Brutus proud.

There has even been murder. A former policeman turned businessman whose body was recently found wrapped in chains and dumped in a river was shot over a lucrative Olympic security contract.

But Sydney won't let that get in the way of its main goal: to party.

The athletes are just part of the entertainment. Sure, they will win a few medals by day, but most locals will be more interested in whom they see and what they do by night.

There is an army of smack-addled rock icons who play the best pub rock in the country to prove the city's party credentials.

The city is reputedly the gay capital of the world and prides itself of being open-minded and an unashamed good time gal. Being anti-gay is uncool in inner Sydney and the best nightlife districts are decidedly gay. The term "meat market" is tossed around with loose abandon.

Gay people won't be having all the fun. Prostitutes from around the world are headed for Sydney, expecting a bonanza. Sydney is the only city in Australia where you can drink at the bar 24 hours a day, with a liberal smattering of round-the-clock "pubs" throughout the city and suburbs. You can dine out for 500 yen and guzzle 200 yen beers.

Melbourne people claim to have a more cosmopolitan culture, better food, more style and taste and a more refined nightlife. Sydneysiders say Melbourne is wet and dreary and, anyway, Sydney has the biggest of everything, so it must be the best.

Perth, 3,500 km away on the nation's west coast, might say Sydney is "up itself," and fails to recognize that a third of the nation's export earnings come from the west. Sydney will respond with a cursory: "Perth -- where's that?"

Sydney senses more in common with Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris and, sure, Tokyo too, although few Sydneysiders have experience of the Godzilla vs. Koala comparison.

But the fact is Sydney drives Australian culture, in a wired age when he who gets his face in front of the camera most often, or spends more advertising dollars on self-promotion, wins.

But Sydney is an international toddler -- although a very beautiful child, it must be said.

Tarnished 'Green Games'

Sydney bid organizers won the right to host the 2000 Olympics on the trendy pitch that they would put on an environmentally friendly "Green Games," but you won't be seeing that claim on the Olympic paraphernalia hoisted up around the city. Greenpeace barely rated Sydney's green credentials a pass, blasting the city for failing to rid toxic contamination from under the Olympic Park site, sponsors' CFC-spewing refrigeration and failure to fulfill its promise to provide alternative-fuel cars in the 3,000 vehicle fleet for International Olympic Committee members and officials.

We are yet to see whether in their enthusiasm, Sydney Olympic organizers learned anything from the lessons of the Atlanta Games.

Urban planners have raised questions about the wisdom of plonking the main Games venues 15 km out of the city center, Coates has blasted the transport system as unacceptable, and organizers admit not much can be done to stop some "nutcase" letting loose with a bomb.

The nation's prime minister, John Howard (who U.S. travel writer Bill Bryson has memorably described as the dullest man in Australia), has empowered the army for civil policing if things get out of hand, aggravating protest groups, of which there will be many.

The nation's Aboriginal people, who while Sydney has swelled to a population of 4 million, have shrunk from as many as a million to just 353,000 in number, plan to protest outside the main venue every day.

U.S. black empowerment activists the Black Panthers promise to bloody Australia's nose with a video campaign across the States highlighting the plight of Aboriginal people, and antiglobalism protesters plan to join the fray after demonstrations at a World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne this week.

As for drugs, the Games could easily be the most doped in history and no one will ever know. Despite apparently strong efforts to root out the cheats, in the absence of a test for human growth hormone, they will be able to drive a convoy of the stuff through the Games without a single positive result.

The Olympic venues were completed in record time, but even then, the nation's architects have hotly debated the vision, or lack of, that went into their design. Some hail the Olympic Stadium as a masterpiece, others think it is dull and drafty. The one design everyone seems to laud are the caterpillar-like toilet blocks dotted around Olympic Park.

The Olympic Games are headed Down Under. Both Olympic officials and Sydney will be hoping wiseacres don't start making the same analogy with regard to the Olympic movement.