The Australian metropolis Sydney was chosen to host the XXVII Summer Olympics in 1993, at the 101st session of the International Olympic Committee. This was the second Summer Games in Australia, but almost half a century had elapsed between the previous XVI Olympics in Melbourne and the 2000 Games.
Summer Games in Sydney began at an unusual time of the year for such forums - in the fall. However, on the southernmost inhabited continent, summer is just beginning at this time, so the weather conditions were quite familiar to the Olympians. The competition began on 13 September 2000, two days before the opening ceremony, and the first official result of the sports program was the score of a football match between the home team and the Italian national team (0: 1). The opening ceremony with the passage of 10,600 Olympians from 199 countries through the stadium "Australia", a theatrical performance and the lighting of the Olympic flame took place in the presence of 110,000 spectators.
The first champion of the games at the turn of the millennium became known the very next day - American Nancy Johnson received the highest award in air rifle shooting. As a result of this Olympiad, several athletes won three gold medals each, and two of them belonged to the US team. These were swimmers - a native of Odessa Leonid Kreiselburg, who specialized in backstroke, and Jenny Thompson, who received all the highest awards in the relay teams, and added a bronze medal to them in the individual championship. Dutchwoman Inge de Bruyne also won three gold and silver medals, and Australian Jan Thorpe, nicknamed "torpedo", received even one more silver medal. But among the Russians there was an athlete who collected in Sydney a collection of six awards - two gold, one silver and three bronze medals were received by gymnast Alexei Nemov. Marion Jones from the USA also received five medals, of which three were gold, but seven years later the IOC canceled all her awards, as it was proven that the American was using doping.
The official closing ceremony of the games took place on October 1, 2000. In total, at the XXVII Olympiad, 300 sets of medals were played, the largest number of which went to the representatives of the United States (92) and Russia (89).
