MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Taking you down under now to the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Australia. CNN's John Raedler spoke with the man behind yesterday's brilliant opening ceremony.</s>JOHN RAEDLER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Ric Birch is tired but ecstatic. It's the morning after he directed the Sydney Olympic Games opening ceremony, an event hailed across Australia as a great success.</s>RIC BIRCH, DIRECTOR, OLYMPIC OPENING CEREMONY: Yeah, certainly within Australia everyone seems very happy, which is not a relief, but it's kind of a vindication of a lot of years work by a lot of people.</s>RAEDLER: And a lot of people watched the results of that work, a worldwide TV audience estimated at three and a half billion. The biggest challenge for Birch was how to transfer the Olympic flame from torch to cauldron.</s>BIRCH: We had to come up with something after Barcelona with the arrow and Atlanta with Muhammad Ali. I knew that we had to do something.</s>RAEDLER: The answer was a dramatically massive cauldron lit by Australia's most popular athlete.</s>BIRCH: Cathy Freeman is something of an icon to Australians and certainly as producers of the ceremonies we couldn't have chosen anyone better.</s>RAEDLER: Birch says Freeman, the world champion 400 meters runner, was not chosen because she is an aborigine.</s>BIRCH: Cathy represented all athletes, not men, not women, not black, not white, but all athletes and the aspirations of athletes.</s>RAEDLER (on camera): The one glitch came when the cauldron jarred to a halt as it started its ascent to the top of the stadium. The problem turned out to be a faulty five cent switch. Technicians overrode it. The cauldron resumed its ascent and Ric Birch breathed again. John Raedler, CNN, Sydney.
Inside the Olympic Opening Ceremonies