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Athens Moving Double-time Towards Olympic
Opening Ceremonies Aug. 13, 2004; 
85% of the City's Hotels Reserved, Most Visitors
Will Stay in 11 Cruise Ships 
By John Powers, The Boston Globe
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News 

Jun. 29, 2003 - ATHENS, Greece --The Olympic preparations in this ancient city, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge likes to say, have the rhythm of the Zorba-like "syrtaki" dance -- a languid start accelerating gradually to a frenetic climax. Now, with the Games of the XXVIIIth Olympiad less than 14 months away, the syrtaki is cranking up briskly, as the hosts are hustling to finish everything on time. 

From the bypass roads to the suburban rail system, from the main stadium to the rowing complex, from the hotel rooms to the tickets, Athens is moving double-time with an anxious eye on the calendar to be ready for the opening ceremonies Aug. 13, 2004. 

"Tangible progress has been made since our last visit, but deadlines remain extremely tight," observed Denis Oswald, the IOC's chief clocker-and-watcher, after his most recent check-in here in April. "Work on construction, transport, and other overlay projects cannot suffer any more slippage." 

That's been the message from the Lords of the Rings, with increasing concern, ever since Athens outbid Rome for these Games six years ago. The infrastructure list was so lengthy and the Greek penchant for postponement so ingrained that the IOC wanted the organizers on a hurry-up schedule from Day 1. 

When things still weren't moving three years ago, largely because of governmental dilly-dallying and finger-pointing, former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch publicly issued a red-light warning. More recently, it's been upgraded to a blinking yellow, with a mandate from Lausanne to stay rigidly on schedule. 

To be sure, the sheer volume of construction has been daunting for a country that is used to keeping its buildings around for a few thousand years. 

"We have to acknowledge that the size and complexity of the projects is something that Greece is facing for the first time," said organizing committee chief Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki after the last IOC inspection. 

Whenever the hosts turned over a shovelful of dirt, it seemed, they either turned up an antique vase or triggered an environmental lawsuit. Sydney didn't have that problem. Now, virtually all the digging has been done and the athletes' village and most of the 38 Olympic venues are recognizable, if not complete. 

Yet there's still enough left unfinished that the IOC is keeping an almost daily watch on progress. At the OAKA complex north of the city, the 75,000-seat main stadium and the natatorium still need roofs. The Helliniko venue on the southwestern seacoast that will stage basketball, baseball, and five other sports is a work-in-progress, as is the boxing hall in northwestern Peristeri and most of the other competitive sites, many of which won't be completed until next year. 

Not to mention the roads, the rails, and the rest of the public works projects, most of which won't be ready until a few months before the torch arrives. 

The ancient Parthenon is getting a facelift for the 2004 Olympics, but it's the erection of new structures that Olympic officials are concerned about. 

"The closer we get now to the opening of the Games," said Oswald, "the more significance any delay can have on the situation." 

If the hosts can complete everything by the time the cauldron is ignited, it will be a crowning achievement for the country that created the Olympics nearly three millennia ago, revived them in 1896, and was bitterly disappointed when it was bypassed for the Centennial Games, which went to Atlanta seven years ago. 

This time the spotlight returns to the city of Socrates and Sophocles, one that has had to remake itself dramatically to stage a 17-day spectacle involving 10,500 athletes from 200 countries and several million spectators. 

"I am sure that people who had been in Athens 10 years ago and will come here for the Games will hardly recognize it," said Oswald. "I should not say that they will not recognize the Acropolis. But the rest of the city will have changed a lot." 

The magnitude of construction is similar to what accompanies the aftermath of a war. Besides the three dozen venues, scattered from Thessaloniki to Crete, there's a new airport (up and running since 2001), a new three-line subway, a new tram system connecting the seacoast venues to downtown, and 210 kilometers of new or improved roads. 

"That will be a tremendous legacy for the city," said Panos Protopsaltis, the organizing committee's transport general manager. "A radical departure from what we have now to what we will have." 

What Athens has now is the worst traffic in Europe, a daylong snarl of trucks, cars, and motorbikes that clogs narrow streets and jams the sidewalks, which drivers use for parking. 

"Traffic has been a big, big problem for Athens," said Protopsaltis. "We have had a very bad track record up to now." 

The success of the Games will depend on how well the organizers can move athletes and spectators in, out, and around the crowded capital, where four of every 10 Greeks live. Since 85 percent of the city's hotels have been reserved for the Olympic "family" of officials, sponsors, and media, the organizers have scrambled to find space anywhere they could. 

That means most visitors will stay in 11 cruise ships moored at the nearby port of Piraeus, in private homes and apartments, in hotels as far as 80 kilometers away, or on one of the many islands that cater to summer tourists. 

"Whatever we could find that had beds," said Basile Niadas, the general manager of Games services. 

But the organizers' most challenging -- and expensive -- task will be security, a primary concern in a Balkan country with porous borders close to the Middle East and northern Africa that has a history of political instability and terrorist activity. 

The total cost will approach $1 billion, with the $600 million budgeted for infrastructure twice what Salt Lake City spent in toto for last year's Winter Games, and the 45,000 security personnel quadruple the previous high. 

"Salt Lake is a landlocked island surrounded by mountains and desert," said Peter Ryan, the committee's consultant who oversaw security in Sydney. "Greece's geopolitical situation makes border control and tracking people through the country quite difficult." 

So the country has organized the Olympic Advisory Group, a seven-nation task force (including the US) with extensive experience in security planning for large events, and hired the US-based Science Applications International Corp. to oversee the 67 technological systems involved. 

Last year, 1,800 personnel were involved in a readiness exercise involving a mock jet hijacking at the airport and a port incident at Piraeus. This year, there will be another terrorist exercise involving 2,000 people, plus future "tabletop" drills. 

"We have factored in every unthinkable scenario we can imagine," said Ryan. 

With every passing week, imagination is becoming reality, as the venues rise from the sun-baked earth, as volunteers (nearly 90,000 so far) sign up, as rooms are booked, as tickets are ordered, as banners pop up around the city. 

Once the construction is complete -- and there may well be "Wet Paint" signs posted on the morning of opening ceremonies -- these Games will become a showcase for Greek style. 

"Each country has its strength," said Oswald. "Greece has creativity. Greece has fantasy. Greece has enthusiasm." 

What Greece does not have is an abundance of time. The pace is quickening and the clock is ticking -- 410 days until the athletes march in and the Olympic syrtaki ends in exhaustion and exuberance. 

-----To see more of The Boston Globe, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.boston.com/globe 

(c) 2003, The Boston Globe. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. 


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