Tarnished but Still Golden
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(After delays, glitches, gridlock and terrorism fears, Athens is ready for the Games to begin)



It seemed like a good idea at the time, but that was when time was still on Athens' side, back in the summer of '97, long before BALCO and Al Qaeda had moved into the everyday language and the hammer throw had become something harried Greek construction workers did to beat a deadline.

Return the Olympics to Greece?

Where they once belonged?

Where they were born thousands of years ago?

Where they were exhumed, rekindled and reclassified as "the modern Olympics" in 1896?

Those were the questions put to the International Olympic Committee seven years ago in Lausanne, Switzerland, where five cities from three continents made their final pitches to serve as host city for the 2004 Summer Games. If we'd known then what we know now, maybe the world's top athletes would today be headed for Rome or Stockholm or Cape Town — maybe even Buenos Aires.

But this was pre-Sept. 11 and post-Atlanta '96, and the concept of an Athens Olympics sounded romantic and charming to some IOC members, felt like requisite penance to others and looked like the least offensive option available to a few more.

That, seven long years ago, was the can't-miss equation that won the Games for Athens.

Rome went into the bidding for those games of antiquity as the heavy favorite, but the IOC quickly got its fill of Primo Nebiolo, then the head of the international track and field federation and a key player in the Rome 2004 bid, who pushed Italy's cause with all the subtlety of a javelin in the foot.

Other finalists had problems, quaint in comparison to today's reality, that scared off the IOC. Buenos Aires, it seemed, wouldn't pull it together in time. Cape Town had too much crime. Stockholm offered cool climes, beautiful scenery and modern facilities, but a local anti-Olympic activist group began exploding bombs around the city to protest the 2004 bid.

So, in a decision that would be viewed with no small amount of irony seven years later, the IOC recoiled from threats of disorganization and civil disobedience, seeking the higher safe ground of … Athens.

Besides, the IOC had already risked the wrath of the Olympic gods by giving the 1996 Summer Games, the centennial modern Games, to Atlanta instead of the birthplace. Barely a year later in Lausanne, the overriding sentiment was: Better not cross them twice.

The crass huckster-fest that was Atlanta '96 embarrassed the IOC, which brought heavy guilt pangs into the chamber where the election for the 2004 Games would be held. It was a modern-day sacrificial altar: Oh, Zeus, we are humbly gathered to apologize for our past transgression and are here now to try to make amends.

So what if Athens still needed to build roads, and stadiums, and a new airport, and a new metro system? Seven years is a long time to get ready. And look — they'll hold the shotput competition at Olympia. And they'll launch the archery competition inside a stadium that dates back to 330 B.C. And they'll start the marathon in, well, Marathon.

Of course, as we suspected then and know for sure today, seven years isn't the same on the Greek calendar. To put it in American sporting terms, Greek organizers spent the first three years sitting on the ball and the next three regrouping before turning the last year into a two-minute drill.

Reports of construction delays and operational glitches have become so commonplace, the Athens Olympic Organizing Committee has become an all-purpose straight line, with no shortage of punch lines.

ESPN the Magazine recently ran a satirical photo of Olympic sprinters in Athens churning down the stretch while workers labored to finish painting the white lane stripes on the track.

In England, a television commercial hawking potato chips has Greek workers kicking back, savoring the new "Mediterranean"-flavored snack food, while Olympic hurdlers on the track below have to jump over the construction equipment left unattended.

Not so funny are the threats of terrorism during the Games and concerns that Greek security might not be up to the enormous task at hand. Several members of the U.S. men's basketball team, all of them NBA veterans, declined invitations to compete in Athens because of security issues. Lindsay Davenport, 1996 Olympic women's tennis gold medalist, and Serena Williams both expressed concerns about safety in Athens.

Despite some nervousness, Williams will compete in Athens. Davenport, worried about anti-American sentiment in Greece and wanting to rest before the U.S. Open, will not.

"I will tell you, it was an amazing feeling, playing in two countries that absolutely love Americans," said Davenport, who also participated in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. "Walking in the opening ceremonies in Atlanta was the highlight of my professional career, as far as being out there with other American athletes, the crowd going crazy.

"I just don't think it will be the same in Greece."

Other American athletes will be sitting out Athens for other reasons. A fair portion of the U.S. track and field team has been sidelined by an ever-widening drug scandal that has redefined the term "Olympic trials," bumping athletes off the track and into the courtroom.

So far in 2004, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has sanctioned a dozen American track and field athletes — and 23 Olympic athletes overall. Among them are Calvin Harrison, a 1,600-meter relay gold medalist in 2000; Kelli White, 100- and 200-meter women's world champion in 2003; Regina Jacobs, a three-time Olympian, and Kevin Toth, 2003 U.S. shotput champion.

The high-profile BALCO drug investigation has targeted such big names as 100-meter world-record holder Tim Montgomery and two-time Olympic relays medalist Chryste Gaines, while casting suspicion on five-time Sydney medalist Marion Jones.

Last month's U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Sacramento became a bizarre exercise in accusation and denial, with athletes and their coaches and agents clashing with reporters over drug-related stories, and other competitors sounding almost relieved that they'd failed to qualify for the Games, thus sparing themselves the angst of the long haul to Athens.

Drugs. Delays. Gridlock. Fear of terrorism. This is not the kind of promotional buildup Athens expected for its Games in 1997. In the public relations war, Greece could certainly use the help of one of its mythical heroes, but Achilles is on the disabled list with a bad heel and half of Jason's argonauts are facing suspension for possible doping violations.

"I'm concerned," said David Wallechinsky, Olympic historian who will be working as a commentator for NBC during the Athens Games. "I think that, from the romance point of view, when people get there and you start seeing features on TV about the Acropolis and the ancient sites, it's going to remind people why the Games went to Athens. [The opening ceremony], I think, will be very dramatic. You will get that beautiful feeling of Greece and its history. So that will come back….

"The rest of it, I'd say there's a lot of problems. I'm nervous. I encouraged my wife and son to come with me, I bought the tickets, got them a place to stay. When my wife expressed some concern when she learned American troops were going to be there, I talked to her, 'It'll be OK.' "

But Wallechinsky conceded that he had also worked hard to convince himself.

"Look, they blew up a police station in Athens a few weeks ago," he said. "I loved the way the mayor of Athens dealt with that. 'Ah, it's not important. These are just local terrorists. They're just, like, nonviolent anarchists. They call in advance. They never hurt anybody. This is not something you should take seriously.'

"And I'm thinking, 'Thank goodness they're nonviolent anarchists.' They blew up a police station! This is not like the 7-Eleven with a little security camera in the corner. This is a police station! So, fine, these people aren't going to do anything, but isn't that kind of a lesson?

"So, yeah, obviously, I'm concerned."

So too is Olympic filmmaker Bud Greenspan.

"I'm not worried necessarily that [terrorism] is going to be there, but somewhere in the world," he said. "The Olympic Games, the queen's coronation, the presidential inauguration — same thing. Terrorists look for places to get their message around the world for nothing."

Greenspan's Olympic films traditionally focus on the upbeat and the inspirational, but even he acknowledges some jading after the BALCO scandal.

"I'd rather spend 100% of my time on the 95% that's good," he said. "A lot of our [media] colleagues are more interested in the 5% that's bad. I think it's there, but I don't think it's [as widespread] as it's been played….

"I think everybody is suspect. I don't think it's fair. It's unfortunate that it's gone this way. I thought Marion Jones was God's gift to womanhood. But she got hit."

Alluding to Jones' subpar sprinting performances at last month's trials, Greenspan said, "I'm not sure if she didn't want to be tested or just wasn't up to shape. We'll never know.

"I've been reading about steroids, and it bothers the hell out of me now. A great two weeks of bluff — these are the Olympic Games, and for them getting into this hole … I think for the next decade, they're going to be suspect. I think of myself. I shouldn't be this way, but the first thing I thought when so-and-so won the 100 at the trials, 'They've got to examine her.' I didn't used to think that way."

Davenport wonders whether the drug cloud hasn't already knocked the bloom off the Olympics.

"It's tough," she said. "It's tough to think and look back at the other Olympics and think, 'Gosh, were they on drugs? Did they cheat?'

"You think of the Olympics, that they would have — I'm so naive — that they would have the best drug testing, that no one could get past them and that'd be crazy. Then you hear all these stories, well, no, that the drug companies are so many steps ahead….

"So it's a little bit disappointing. It's a little bit disappointing when you hear that some of them maybe admitted to it in some of the investigations. It's pretty disheartening."

Greenspan said he feared the following scenario in Athens: Athlete competes, athlete earns gold medal, athlete is drug-tested and "the winner may be, four days later, out of business again. Like Ben Johnson in Seoul. I was there when he won it; I was there when they took it away from him….

"In the Seoul Olympics, when Johnson won, Calvin Smith moved up from fourth to third after the disqualification. He said, 'Bud, let me tell you something, six of the eight finalists were on stuff.' I said, 'Were you one?' And he said, 'I wouldn't tell you if I was one of them.' "

Ed Hula, editor of Around the Rings, an Atlanta publication that covers the Olympic movement, says the bad publicity leading into the Games "certainly has made it a lot harder to want to come and have a great time. Instead, everybody's worried about whether it's all going to happen."

Hula arrived in Athens the last week of July and said he was pleasantly surprised by the progress organizers had made in recent months.

"In a lot of ways, it seems to be in pretty good shape," he said. "I was last here in May and to come here now is to really see the place transformed. It looks like a city that's going to be able to host the Olympic Games at this point.

"All the signs that led to doubts about the physical sides of things have been pretty much erased…. The big question remains, how will it be when it's put into the real test mode here?

"I haven't heard of any major screw-ups. The worst thing has been the poor way they've been handling information about stuff that's been happening. That's a press-relations function, certainly not critical to the outcome of the Games, how we write about them or our attitude toward them."

Wallechinsky says the lighting of the Olympic torch, when it finally happens, will signal a sort of reprieve for Athens' beleaguered Olympic planners.

"The day after the opening ceremonies, we're all going to be talking about the athletes and the competition," he said. "As annoying as bad transportation, too much heat and lapsed infrastructure is to us who are there, people watching on TV, frankly, don't care.

"They're going to care if there are terrorist attacks, but other than that, they're not going to care that we're inconvenienced and frustrated, because they're going to be riveted by the competition, as it should be.

"I also think the IOC, in particular, will do everything they can when a problem develops to shift it back to the competition. I think we saw that with Sale and Pelletier," he said, referring to Canadian pairs skaters Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, who were awarded a second set of gold medals at Salt Lake City in 2002 after a vote-swapping judging scandal that tainted a competition won by the Russian team of Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze.

"I thought that was a bad decision," Wallechinsky said, " but I understood why [IOC President] Jacques Rogge made it. As each day went on, people were winning gold medals and nobody was interviewing them, because just one story was dominating. The only way to get [the focus] back on the other athletes was to do something to shut up the story. And I can see similar situations, I think they'll be ready."

Hula views the Games with optimism. "I think they are going to be excellent Games, in terms of how they're conducted and how they're held," he said. "Despite the worries about preparations, they've held test events of one form or another in all the sports, so they have a basic familiarity. It doesn't seem like, at this point, they're going to be technically marred. Maybe they'll have problems in rowing, or maybe something will come up at some venue. But there are no danger signals there….

"We don't know exactly how it's going to be when all the people come together with all the volunteers and all the other workers really hit their peak and the crowds come and how all that's going to go. But everybody seems to be upbeat and happy and all that. I think it's going to be a happy but hot event."

And if the Greeks need an assist as they rush to finish preparations, Mark Spitz, winner of seven swimming gold medals in 1972, has declared his readiness to step up.

"If at the opening ceremonies they hand me a chair, a bag of four bolts and a ratchet wrench to install my seat, I think that would be just great," Spitz said. "Anything I could do to help."

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