Contributors: Sep. 11, 2000

THE OLYMPICS require a well-trained team of journalists to cover them, and TIME has been preparing for the spectacular in Sydney for more than a year. In this issue we preview the wondrous global athletes that will command the planet's attention as the pageantry unfurls. "The Olympics celebrate competitors from every part of the world," says Bill Saporito, who edits TIME's business and sport sections; he has also covered three soccer World Cups. "This week readers are going to meet a group of incredible athletes."

To get in shape for Sydney, TIME assembled its own stellar team, including senior editor Robert Sullivan and chief of reporters Jane Bachman Wulf. Between them, Sullivan and Wulf have attended more than a dozen Olympics for our sister publication SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. (SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/Time Inc. is an official Olympic sponsor.) This week Sullivan profiles Marion Jones, the Games lead story. To watch her compete in Brussels, Sullivan says, was "to see a stadium full of track-crazed fans screaming for their hero, and to get a feeling for what she's trying to accomplish on a worldwide stage." With reporter Sora Song, he also covers something less glorious: the persistence of performance-enhancing drug use among athletes. The TIME team in Sydney will include our (conveniently) Australian-born senior editor Belinda Luscombe, correspondent Sally B. Donnelly, staff writer Joel Stein and assistant picture editor Jessica Taraski. Associate art director D.W. Pine will convert their work into sumptuous layouts. The staff of TIME Australia, our South Pacific edition, is already in full Olympic mode. With these Games, Wulf, our sports sage, can add a new chapter to her college thesis, which studied TIME coverage of the Olympics since World War II. She traces her passion for the Olympics to their pageantry. "All these nationalities coming together," she says, "is wonderful to watch." And to cover.

ROBERT HUGHES, our pugnacious and perspicacious art critic, has long held that American films and TV fare have created an outrageously false impression of his native Australia. In response to the "Crocodile Dundee" stereotypes, Hughes lets fly this week with a look at the Olympic-host country that is based on his six-part documentary, Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore, which airs this Tuesday through Thursday on PBS. Hughes, who is back in top form while still mending from a near fatal car crash last year, calls the series "a corrective to the very sketchy and almost invariably wrong picture of Australia that most Americans have. We are not your lost Wild West." Britain's Guardian describes the series as "a fantastic documentary" that offers "a real, gritty feel for Australia" as well as a close-up of "Hughes' own endearing eccentricities."