Greeks have things in order

ATHENS — What if we've been all wrong about this city and its Olympics?

It certainly is within the realm of possibility at the 2004 Olympic Games that terrorists won't strike, that the viselike grip of security won't smother spectators and participants, that smog won't choke runners, that traffic won't be snarled for miles and that all the venues will be completed on time.

What if the Olympic Games of Least Expectations actually come off without a hitch? Talk about your great sports upsets.

Do you believe in miracles?

Well, maybe. It would be difficult to approach an Olympics with any more trepidation than that with which the world greets these Games, beginning Friday night with the Opening Ceremony in the main stadium. A country with almost as many people as Ohio has been asked to spend $1.5 billion to stop terrorism at the only regularly scheduled gathering of the world.

Easy, this isn't. This is a small place with a very large burden. Athens organizers certainly didn't know what they were in for when they won the Games in 1997, four years before Sept. 11, 2001.

It's likely no country so small with such limited resources ever again will be given the Games and their overwhelming security challenges.

Somehow, it makes sense that this would happen to Greece. This is the home of the first Olympic Games, the home of the modern Olympic Games and now the home of the first Summer Games of the postmodern, post-Sept. 11 era. It's a first that someone has to shoulder, so, historically speaking, why not the Greeks?

Athenians always seemed to know what the rest of the world didn't: that the Games would be ready in time.

As roofs were lying in pieces in the dirt, or scuttled altogether, many around the world fretted that this was a sign of Olympic-sized doom. Now, as the glistening white arches over the main stadium light up the night sky for miles, it turns out this simply is the Greek way.

What might send other cultures up a wall only seems natural to the Greeks. Now we're realizing they're just a bunch of last-minute Charlies. Tickets for Olympic events that have been available for a year only now are being snapped up by Greeks who finally have decided to queue at the box office. Visitors who were here in spring barely recognize the place now. Clearly, the Greeks work well on deadline.

But Athens is still hot and dusty and a bit more laid-back than many might like. When an Olympic security guard is twirling around a machine gun to while away the hours with his colleagues, you might find yourself wishing for the regimented winter soldiers who stood stone-faced at the entrances to the 2002 Olympic venues in Salt Lake City.

Greece can be a confounding place where an athlete might yet get stuck in traffic on his or her way to compete, especially if he or she misses a bus and has to hail a taxi. That, then, becomes an Olympic event of its own. Taxis pull up when hailed, but then refuse to let you in. Or try catching a cab at the port in Piraeus, where a supervisor has your taxi picked out, except for the fact that the driver is nowhere to be found.

There are runners who will finish the men's 5,000 meters in the main stadium faster than some poor souls will find a taxi in Athens.

Once in a cab, it's a 20-minute ride from the stadium of 1896, Panathinaiko, to the one of 2004. Spiridon Louis, who won the first Olympic marathon with the prince and crown prince of Greece running by his side for his final steps in the old stadium, never would have envisioned what he has wrought. Where Louis once ran, archers will now stand — and the men's and women's marathons, which begin in Marathon, will end.

Louis' legacy has turned Greece into the center of the athletic universe once more.

Acres of brightly colored umbrellas are being unfurled throughout the Olympic park, thousands of saplings hurriedly are being stuck into the new earth beside every stadium and arena and hundreds of eternally hopeful volunteers can barely believe this day has finally arrived.

It's all Greek to them, which, we can fervently hope, is good enough for the Olympics once again.