Official logo of these Games: an empty chair

ATHENS, Greece — A chair. An empty, lonely, waiting-for-a-rump-to-comfort-me chair. Yes, the official logo of the Montreal Expos has become the enduring symbol of the 28th Olympiad, an exercise in solitude that has left one question burning like a cauldron in the night:

If you spend nearly $2 billion to protect Summer Games fans who don’t show up to be protected, did you really spend nearly $2 billion?

A teeming street festival of culture and sport, of peace and understanding, has given way to an eerie wasteland devoid of people and noise. To walk past the main cluster of Olympic venues here is to expect Rod Serling to emerge from behind a pillar and introduce your very own episode of "The Twilight Zone."

"Where is everyone?" my cab driver demanded to know. "There are fewer people in Athens now than there were last summer."

He was driving me back from the Acropolis and Parthenon, where no lines halted a tourist on the winding walk up. Greeks traditionally flee to the islands for their August holiday, but where are the Americans, the Brits and the French? Where are the spend-happy tourists who would spare the Greeks from picking up the multi-billion dollar check to be left unsigned at the marathon finish line?

Ian Thorpe, Michael Phelps and America’s basketball misadventures are about the only shows playing to sold-out crowds. Who put out those reports of brisk last-second ticket sales that was sure to save the Athens Games? Must’ve been the same marketing genius who came up with the idea of pushing Phelps as a Spitz-smacking, $1 million bonus baby, leading a teenager into a trap he didn’t see or deserve.

These Summer Games look more like a convention of overweight journalists and overdressed volunteers. They greet each other as they pass between one stadium and the next. They wonder why there’s no mass of humanity to negotiate from here to there.

In Sydney and Atlanta, you wore the sweat of many nations. But the famously congested streets of Athens look more like the country roads of West Virginia in the pre-dawn hours.

Baseball, badminton, men’s gymnastics, women’s soccer, beach volleyball. Good sections available to one and all. The women’s basketball tournament was filling up 12 percent of the arena’s available seats, while some sports saw 12 percent capacity as a distant dream.

It’s impossible to measure how much terrorism and fear reduced the turnout, but this much is clear: Greek organizers didn’t help their cause by finishing off their roads and Olympic infrastructure at the very last second. By pouring so much desperate energy into the completion of essential projects, the Greeks neglected all attention to aesthetic detail.

Hence, a walk past the Olympic Stadium and toward the swimming venue feels like a Neil Armstrong hop across a lunar landscape, where prairie winds kick up swirling duststorms, and where nothing is green but a sadsack procession of Charlie Brown Christmas trees.

Does Beijing really want this in 2008? Does New York in 2012? Terrorism anxiety is here to stay; Greece has proven that money can’t make it disappear.

Now some 45,000 are expected to make a pilgrimage to Olympia for Wednesday’s shot put, and I’ll believe it when I see it. Right now, I don’t know if there are 45,000 people in Athens, a city of 3.7 million residents.

Welcome Home, the signs announced in and around the Games’ birthplace. The Olympics came home, but nobody was there.

The people fled for the islands and the mountains, and left future Summer Games organizers to ponder that nagging question: How much does it cost to protect an empty chair?