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From the official calendar:
The Opening Ceremony for the Sydney 2000
Olympic Games will begin at 7pm (AEDT) on Friday, Sept. 15 and end
three hours later at Stadium Australia at Homebush Bay. The order of
proceedings is:
Welcome
Heads of state arrival
Cultural section
Athletes Parade
Official opening/speech
Arrival of Olympic Flag
Pageantry
Oaths, athletes and judges
Arrival of torch bearer
Lighting of flame
Finale
The Australian Broadcasting System report described the ceremony's
climax as follows:
"With a thunderous "G'Day" roar to the watching world,
Australia launched the 2000
Olympics in a sizzling opening ceremony topped when
Aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman
lit the Olympic flame.
"After its 100-day journey carried by 11,000 torchbearers
across the world, the Olympic
flame arrived at its final destination to light up the sky
above Stadium Australia for the
next 17 days.
"The 27-year-old Freeman, Australia's gold medal hope over
400 metres and 200
metres, set the Olympic cauldron ablaze inside a pool of
water as the 110,000 crowd
roared their approval.
"She then waited for several confusing minutes - the pageant
by now had already well
exceeded its allocated time span - before the blazing
cauldron slowly ascended a ramp over a fountain leading to its final
position
high above the stadium, unleashing a booming fireworks
display which lit up the Sydney night sky."
The actual timing of events is difficult to determine, but several
reports indicate it was drawn out, and the most direct indication of
the time the flame was lit by Cathy Freeman was an observation that the
ceremony was 4 hours and 20 minutes long.
This would place the climax well after the nominal time, and the
planned analysis thus is arbitrarily set to cover the period from
11:00 to 12:00, GMT, corresponding to 22:00 to 23:00 in Sydney.
The result is a modest positive
cumulative Chisquare of 3622.5 on 3600 df, with p = 0.393. The following
figure shows the hour centered on the event.
It is natural to ask how nearby eggs responded during this time, so the
two eggs in New Zealand were separately extracted (we have none in
Australia at the present time). Their data show a
much larger deviation during the same time, with Chisquare = 3752.7 on
3600 df, and p = 0.037. The period of two hours, beginning at 9:00 pm
in Sydney, shows a very strong trend, which starts shortly before the
climax and continues for an hour or more, as shown in the next figure.
The Chisquare is 7527 on 7200, for p = 0.0037. Neither of these latter
analyses can be included in the formal assessment, but they are included
here for their instructive value.
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