Forget the sports - some of the hottest tickets for the Sydney Olympics next year are for Pina Bausch, Andrea Bocelli, Riccardo Muti and Sylvie Guillem.
These top artists - together with thousands of other musicians, dancers, actors and painters - will achieve their own heights of human achievement in an Olympic arts festival for which the programme was announced in Australia yesterday.
Culture at the Olympics dates back to Greek times, when sport and art were seen as equally important, and most of the modern Games have also had arts programmes - although oddly, until 1956, they were run competitively.
Fortunately, a team of judges no longer has to decide whether Maxim Vengerov or Pinchas Zukerman - both violinists featured at the 2000 Arts Games - should score the perfect 10. There will be no battle for gold by wearers of tutus and no drug tests for contemporary dancers.
'Making poetry and music competitive just didn't work - of course,' said artistic director of the Olympic Arts Festival Leo Schofield. 'Now the arts are like a pendant to the sports: they remind us that there are different kinds of excellence.' For him, the Olympics festival is 'the biggest festival of them all: think of Edinburgh, Salzburg, Adelaide: wrap them up and multiply by 10'.
It is 2.5 months long - opening on August 18, a month before the Games, and running to the end of the Paralympics in October.