Kevan Gosper, head of the IOC Press Commission, said the organizers of the 2000 summer Games in Sydney will ''have a high hurdle to clear'' to match Nagano's high-tech performance.

IOC Director General Francois Carrard echoed such views saying the Games deserve gold for their outstanding technology.

''The Nagano Games were the Games of high technology with a human touch, this is exactly what we have seen, high technology, the high standards in degrees of quality.''

Carrard heads the IOC's technology working group, which was set up after the disastrous experiences with the media information system at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

The system was widely criticized for gaps in its database, erroneous data and an unreliable, slow real time result system.

''When we took over this problem after Atlanta we were very scared...because the deadlines were so close and there were so many things to be solved,'' Carrard said.

But he said close cooperation with Nagano Games technology sponsors such as computer giant IBM and leading news agencies had paid off in fixing the technical glitches that marred the Atlanta Games.

''We have all together managed to see to it that from an IT (information technology) point of view the success of the Games has been perfectly assured,'' he said.

According to the IOC, the Nagano Games results system produced more than 1 trillion bytes of data, more than five times the volume of data generated during the 1994 Lillehammer Games.

More than six million information requests were logged on to ''Info '98,'' an on-line service for journalists and IOC personnel providing data such as results, medals standings, a historical data base and athletes' biographies.

The web site for the Nagano Games organizing committee (NAOC), the first for an Olympic Winter Games, is expected to receive more than 600 million hits for the duration of the 16-day Games, compared with 187 million hits registered in Atlanta.

It reached a peak of 103,049 hits per minute Friday during the final stages of the men's semifinal ice hockey game between Finland and Russia and as U.S. figure skaters Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski competed for the gold medal. (Kyodo News)