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But for those making the trip, consider this a travel advisory: as the Aug. 13 torch lighting draws near, many venues still don't have pavement, signage or landscaping. The architect of the main stadium, Santiago Calatrava, insists he will need every minute until the opening ceremonies to finish his work. The $312 million central security system, designed to monitor everyone from pickpockets to al-Qaeda operatives, will not be fully operational. The nation's power grid is shaking like an old washing machine. Every class of laborer, from hotel employees to prostitutes, has threatened an Olympics-timed strike. Traffic barely moves.
If the situation sounds dire, it is actually much improved. In 1997, a year after watching parvenu Atlanta turn the Olympics into the world's largest county fair--lots of ads, lots of barbecue, no gravitas--the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.) awarded the 2004 Games to Athens. The only reason was history. For 1,200 years--from the mid-700s B.C. to the end of the 4th century A.D.--tens of thousands of spectators from across the ancient world descended on the fields of Olympia to watch athletes compete. Wars were suspended, clothes were stripped off, and wine was devoured in what was the premodern equivalent of Woodstock, the Super Bowl and a suburban key party. In their 2004 bid, the Greeks promised not just to reference their history but also to re-create it. The shot-put event would be staged amid the ruins of ancient Olympia; the marathon course would retrace the doomed steps of Phidippides and end with a triumphant lap around Panathinaiko Stadium, site of the first modern Olympics in 1896. And those Games went swimmingly. There were 311 participating athletes (men only). Cost to the host: $542,300.
The I.O.C. was so captivated by Athens' past that it overlooked the city's present. It had no modern infrastructure, a serious domestic-terrorism problem, a limp economy and a labor force best described as mercurial. Indeed, three years after winning its bid for the Games, Athens had accomplished nothing in terms of venue construction, security or strategic planning. In April 2000, Juan Antonio Samaranch, then president of the I.O.C., described Athens as the worst organizational crisis in his 20-year career.
To save itself from historic ignominy, Athens turned to a hurricane of a personality known as Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki. Although she had headed the successful bid committee, she had been left off the inappropriately named organizing committee. So she took it over. A Harvard lecturer and the first woman to lead an Olympic organizing committee, Angelopoulos-Daskalaki exudes so much power in such expensive skirts that she appears to have leaped fully formed from the imagination of Danielle Steel. Using her political clout as a former member of the Greek Parliament, her commercial savvy as the wife of a shipping tycoon and an impeccable instinct for knowing when to scare or seduce her adversaries, she somehow persuaded the government, which oversees all public works and Olympic construction in Greece, to begin a desperate game of catch-up on 138 Olympics-related infrastructure projects. "It was like running the marathon," she recalls, "at a sprinter's pace."