In Over Their Heads?

The roof over Olympic Stadium, a thing of steel-laced beauty designed by the famed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, was designed as the symbol of the 2004 Olympic Games in a modern Greece.

Today, with only 168 days to go until the opening ceremony Aug. 13, the roof is nowhere near finished. On either side of the stadium, only the giant white arches designed to support the web-like canopy are up. And they aren’t yet standing by themselves, each propped up by scaffolding.

Casting a forlorn silhouette against the pale wintry sky, the arches stand now as a reminder of the problem-plagued journey the Greeks have taken since being awarded the Games in 1997.

With the leadership of the International Olympic Committee gathered here this week, along with senior delegates from more than 200 national Olympic committees, Greek officials said Thursday that the roof would be done in time. So too would other projects, they said, acknowledging that time was tight.

IOC officials express confidence.

“We trust you,” President Jacques Rogge told Athens 2004 organizers earlier this week, adding moments later in a speech to the Assn. of National Olympic Committees that the Athens Games would show that “this country is big enough and great enough to succeed.”

Greek officials also exude optimism.

“There is an urgency that allows us to say things are going well,” Athens 2004 President Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki told reporters.

But savvy Olympic officials note that public confidence may well be the only viable option.

One Olympic insider who for years has monitored preparations for the Games, speaking on condition of anonymity, compared the situation to a horse race in which a jockey has been riding a mount particularly hard. If the jockey is the IOC, the horse the Greek government and Athens 2004, the worry is that more whipping will not inspire the horse -- but prompt collapse just shy of the finish line.

Another Olympic official said, “I think they’ll make it,” quickly adding that there was no choice but to hope that the Greeks would emerge true to their reputation for eleventh-hour heroics. “There is no Plan B.”

There are three main worries in Athens -- construction, security and transport.

Security is always an Olympic worry. Two government trucks were fire-bombed Thursday, a group calling itself “Phevos and Athena” -- the names of the Olympic mascots -- claiming responsibility and saying the attack was timed to coincide with Rogge’s visit.

The Greek government has budgeted 650 million euros, about $820 million, for security -- more than three times the money allocated in 2000 for the Sydney Games.

Transport too is always an Olympic worry. Here, the worry is particularly keen. It can take an hour to go two or three miles through central Athens -- and that’s with all traffic lanes open.

During the Games, only one lane of Kifissias Avenue, the main north-south route to Olympic Stadium, will be open in some sections to the general public. The idea is to force fans off the road and onto public transit.

Will it work?

“Nobody forgets or ignores what a bad track record we have in traffic,” said Panos Protopsaltis, the Games’ transit manager. “It’s a driving thing here. You are reminded of it from the moment you are a little kid, and you face the traffic. We want to solve it for the Games and leave a legacy for afterward.”

Construction woes, meanwhile, have long plagued Greece’s preparations. In Sydney, such work was finished a year ahead of time.

The construction, Greek officials say ruefully, detracts from the focus they’d prefer, on what Culture Minister Evangelos Venizelos has called the “added value” Greece brings to the Olympic enterprise.

The Games began in Greece, in 776 BC. The first modern Games were held in Athens in 1896. Angelopoulos-Daskalaki said organizers envisioned the 2004 Games as a return “to the ideals that lay at the heart of the Games: internationalism, peace, a struggle to expand the limits of achievement.”

The Olympic torch, for instance, will be lighted March 25 at the ancient site in Olympia. The torch, for the first time, will be taken to Africa and South America on its journey around the world.

Moreover, according to Costas Cartalis, the government’s general secretary for the Games, the Olympics afford the chance to show off a new Greece -- one that has cast its future with the European Union.

“It’s the opportunity for the country to demonstrate a different stereotype, a different way of operation,” he said.

What visitors to Athens still see, however, are construction and more construction.

Led by Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, Athens was awarded the Games in September 1997. She then left the Olympic scene and the organization foundered.

In April 2000, then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch called the situation the worst organizational debacle he’d seen.

The Greeks went back to Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, who took control of the organizing committee, a private organization, not a government entity.

In turn, the government -- responsible for building roads and stadiums -- stepped up the pace in what Venizelos called the “largest and the most ambitious project for the real modernization of our country,” infrastructure worth about 4.6 billion euros, $5.7 billion.

Even so, as Venizelos said this week, there emerged “many hesitations, objections, rumors, ambiguous points, public controversies, environmental and archeological problems in different Olympic sites.”

Even so, much has been accomplished.

A new airport -- about 45 minutes from central Athens -- is open. Miles of new or upgraded roads are open, including a highway to and from the airport. Miles of subway or light-rail track have been laid.

But much remains to be done.

Of the 39 permanent Games-related venues, 15 are done, including the Olympic village, a collection of red-roofed townhouse-like units.

That leaves 24 others.

Of those 24, 12 are 90% or more complete, according to Cartalis.

That leaves 12 more in various states of readiness. Including Olympic Stadium.

A leading Greek newspaper, Kathimerini, reported Wednesday that any or all of five technical factors could stall completion of the roof.

Other factors could slow it, including national elections set for March 7. The left-wing PASOK party, which has ruled Greece for years, is being challenged by conservative New Democracy. Polls show New Democracy in the lead, and a New Democracy win might mean that some or all government officials could be out on the street -- their Olympic expertise gone five months before the Games.

Not to worry, Venizelos said, the roof would be done this spring.

It has to get done, he said, because the opening ceremony is keyed to the roof.

“I have no doubt about the final result,” he said.