Houston not good enough for the Olympics and Athens is...

They have one year to finish this mess.

Only two of the 29 Olympic venues in Athens have been completed

The Olympic Games return to Greece one year from today, or are supposed to at least. After numerous delays, organizers finally held the year's first test event last weekend, at the rowing venue because, the joke goes, they didn't have to build the Aegean Sea.

Everything went well. Sort of. They finished the event, and no one drowned.

But there were the notorious August winds at Schinias Beach, which were so strong that the course was shortened one day and several shells sank. There were the Ukrainian and Korean rowers who were missing for several hours when their bus got lost on the way from the airport to their hotels. There were the policemen who didn't know how to operate the screening and communications equipment. There were the volunteers, 24 percent of whom simply didn't show up.

And there was the entire German team, which packed up and went home after 63 members got salmonella food poisoning after lunch at their hotel. Even worse, Greek media reported that health authorities had inspected the hotel's kitchen two weeks earlier and found 23 hygiene violations, and that a second inspection a week later determined only some of the problems had been remedied.

It is all part of what Greeks call the "maturity phase" of a construction project, which means that it typically takes twice as long to get clearance to build something as it does to actually build it. One problem is that Greece is one giant archeological dig. The other, as one Athens organizing committee official put it, "is that we are a democracy."

The newest Olympic sport appears to be rhythmic court injunctions, which allow Greeks, in the true tradition of Socrates and Plato, to debate a project's merit in tedious detail. According to one report, 45 Olympics projects were tied up in the courts in 2002 alone.

The result is that only now, six years after the International Olympic Committee first granted Athens the 2004 Games, are many of the building projects proceeding, turning Athens into the planet's largest construction zone and etching lines of concern across the brows of IOC officials – many of whom live in a country, Switzerland, where you can set your watch by trains.

A year out from the 2000 Games in Sydney, practically every venue and every piece of infrastructure was complete. The glossy brochures from the organizing committee showed actual photos of the sports facilities. They could have been the 1999 Summer Olympics.

Athens a year out? It has glossy brochures ... with artist's renderings.

Two of the 29 venues are done, neither of them a sports facility: the International Broadcast Center and the drug-testing lab.

The main Olympic complex in northern Athens is a massive dirt plain with backhoes and cement mixers weaving around piles of gravel and steel beams. The tennis stadium is a metal shell, as is the upper deck of the outdoor swimming pool. The water polo pool is barely more than a concrete hole. The velodrome has no seats.

The 1970s-era track stadium that is undergoing major renovation has no seats yet, either. The field is a patch of brown grass with rusting soccer goals at either end. Five-foot high weeds are growing in the long-jump pits. A cement mixer is parked on the faded track.

The scoreboard clock on one end says it's noon. The clock at the opposite end says it's 10:14. Neither is right. It's 4:25 in the afternoon.

Besides new seats, the stadium's big makeover involves an exquisite steel and glass roof designed by famed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. The parts started arriving only in the past few weeks from abroad, and the IOC has expressed apprehension about going forward with a purely aesthetic project when, let's face it, the stadium it will cover is in shambles. There is now talk of installing the roof after the Games.

The baseball, field hockey and beach volleyball venues at the Helliniko complex are in construction infancy, and their test events have been pushed back to next spring. In its April inspection, the IOC said only 12 percent of the complex was completed.

The stadium slated to host the soccer finals? Didn't break ground until May.

The main media village? Journalists have been told they will be informed of "alternative housing" if it isn't finished in time.

The suburban rail line that will link downtown with the new airport? Only eight of 20 miles of track laid.

The tram line so vital for transporting fans to the southern venues? Less than two of 17 miles done.

There also are the hundreds of smaller projects aimed at sprucing up the city ahead of the world's visit. Chunks of jack-hammered sidewalks piled on the side of streets. Subway stations closed for renovation. Yellow cranes dotting the skyline. Highway overpasses abruptly ending in mid-air in a tangle of rebar, like a Cyclops bit it off.

Even the Parthenon, perched above the grimy metropolis as a constant reminder of its glorious past, is covered in scaffolding.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/20030813-9999_1s13oly.html

 

Obviously Houston wasn't ever going to get the Olympics, but the city was much better prepared to host an event of this magnitude. I forget which games Houston was shooting for, but to give Athens the 2004 games without taking in to consideration the sizable list of ridiculous problems makes me think some money was exchanged sometime during the selection process. Maybe in a decade Athens will be ready, but 2004 ---->

 

Your right LG lets lighten this thread up, we are being ever so hard on the poor Athenians. If we start sending them some PMA (Positive Mental Attitude) they will be able finish those 27 venues on time so the Olympics can take place next year. I know there is alot of history over there, but just because the Olympics started in
Athens doesn't mean they need to use the same facilities.