Cities fight to host the Olympics because they’re desperate to show their face to the world, and for Sydney, the stakes are enormous. It’s remote: 14 air hours from Los Angeles and nine from Hong Kong, and only 3 million tourists make the trip each year (New York gets 10 times as many). But during the 16 days of the Games, the city will host 1.5 million visitors, and more importantly, a global television audience of nearly 4 billion. With $1.8 billion in Olympics construction–the largest building project ever undertaken in Australia–Sydney wants an opportunity not just to get beyond the images of bounding kangaroos or Paul Hogan’s throwing another shrimp on the barbie, but to create something uniquely Australian. The local Olympics authorities signed up a raft of top local architecture firms to create the sports arenas, the amenities and the Olympic Village where 15,000 athletes will stay; the only major outsider is an American landscape architect who developed the master plan for the Olympic Park. But ambitious as Sydney’s Olympic building program is, it somehow misses the mark: most of the big facilities look more practical than spectacular, and by clustering them together, far out of town, the city has failed to exploit its unique local flavor and natural assets.

Sydney’s never been known for its architecture, apart from the famous Opera House, but rather for its stunning waterfront, with its azure bays that fan out from the city center to the beaches and lush shores of its fancy suburbs. Many of the modern high-rises in the city are downright ugly, a bow to pragmatic development rather than civic pride. “The great disadvantage of the city is the harbor,” sniffs Glenn Murcutt, Australia’s most famous international architect. “If you get a building with glass in it to see the view, you don’t see your own building. We have some of the most mediocre buildings in the world.” (Murcutt, significantly, sat out the Olympic building marathon.) The downtown used to die at night, but like a lot of cities, Sydney’s now becoming less suburban and more Europeanized–a trend avidly promoted by its lord mayor and encouraged by a new influx of Yuppies who want to live downtown and hang out in sidewalk cafes, wine bars and late-closing restaurants.

Yet the local planners who envisioned the Olympics opted not to capitalize on Sydney’s new cosmopolitanism: rather than scattering the venues for the Games around the city, as Los Angeles and Barcelona did, they essentially built a new suburb nine miles northwest of downtown. It was a practical solution–a way to avoid traffic snarls and other logistical problems during the Games while attracting long-term development to a once blighted outpost. Homebush Bay, where most of the sports venues and the Olympic Village are sprawled across a 1,900-acre site, had been home to the largest abattoir in the Southern Hemisphere, where up to 20,000 animals a day were slaughtered. Nearby was an abandoned brickworks, a place so desolate that director George Miller found it a perfect location for the movie “Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome.” In less than five years of construction, this unforgiving wasteland has been largely cleaned up and turned into a sports theme park that will be used by families and sports-mad Aussies for years to come, local authorities hope. The 110,000-seat Stadium Australia is the centerpiece of a dozen facilities, including a superdome, and tennis, hockey and aquatic centers, all surrounded by a vast swath of green park and reclaimed wetlands.

The road to Homebush is paved with such good environmental intentions. To discourage cars, there’s a rail system that can handle 50,000 people an hour and terminates in an award-winning Olympic station. The Olympic Village, eventually to be a private community with its own school and shopping center, will be the largest solar-powered suburb in the world during the Games. The entire scheme is knit together with expanses of fancy paving and rows of new trees, oases of water and works of art. Yet the vast, middle-of-nowhere flatness of Homebush Bay denies Sydney’s character as a port city on the edge of a great ocean. Though a river trickles into the site–and VIPs can travel to the Games by boat to a graceful ferry terminal–there’s no sense that the sea is near. “I see it as a great missed opportunity,” says architect Richard LePlastrier, who, like Murcutt, has been an influential force on young designers. “We’re not a land-based city. It would have been a great opportunity to revive some of the industrial sites on the waterfront.”

And if you look at the design of most of the sports facilities, you could be anywhere. The style is a sort of engineering esthetic, with a clean, industrial look. (Indeed, the construction was completed with much-praised efficiency, although there have been some criticisms, such as windiness in the stadium, which could impede track-and-field athletes. Olympic officials say these issues have been mostly resolved.) The effect of all that metal, glass and white pipe is surprisingly light, given the scale of the arenas. But the buildings are more pleasantly generic than inspired, like a nice modern airport that wouldn’t make you look twice as you rush to catch a plane. The most distinctive architecture in Australia flows out of the harsh landscape and responds to the wind and sunlight. To find that at the Olympic Park you have to look at some of the smaller venues, like the archery range by Peter Stutchbury, with its lyrical landscape of wafting grasses. Stutchbury has taken the simplest idea in Australian architecture–the farm shed–and made a roof of corrugated steel, held up by tilting red beams with triangular tops, shaped like the ends of arrows. The angle of the beams shifts subtly, creating a slight twist in the plane of the roof. “The roof is the big parasol protector that opens to the north and east, where our breezes come from,” explains the architect. As for wildly inventive design, well, there are those toilets, by Neil Durbach, with their tent tops that shelter their users from the heat (but not the light) of the Australian sun.

For the really wildly inventive, it’s still hard to top the 25-year-old Sydney Opera House, where the Olympic triathlon will begin and end, bringing the athletic events for a few rare moments into the heart of the city on the waterfront. With its evocation of white sails, the Opera House seems as indigenous to Sydney as the ferries that crisscross its harbor. But it’s worth remembering that the building’s design was so mired in controversy–and its construction so plagued with problems and cost overruns–that the architect walked off the job and a government was thrown out of office. Sydney in many ways is a conservative city: despite the glimmers of indigenous inventiveness in some projects, the vast Olympic scheme and much of the architecture do seem a missed opportunity. Naturally, the excitement of the Games will transcend the setting, but when it comes to great design, Sydney’s missed the gold.