Olympic Games Build-up: The city has become a vast construction site as authorities race to have it ready by 2004, writes Karolos Grohmann

Greece is under pressure to get sporting venues ready for the 2004 Athens Olympics and at the same time spruce up an ancient capital that no longer wants to be known as just a cradle of civilisation.

Two years before the Games return to Greece after 108 years, Athens has become a vast construction site as authorities race against the clock to have it ready by the opening ceremony on August 13th, 2004. Games officials, who today start the two-year countdown to the start of the event, are worried that there is still a major challenge ahead to fill the near-insatiable demand for accommodation.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has urged the Athens Games organisers (ATHOC), troubled by delays and bureaucratic hurdles, to speed up preparations as there is no time to lose.

A city of more than four million people, almost half of Greece's population, Athens has long been dogged by huge traffic problems, air pollution and a lack of parks and recreational areas.

For the next two years, rather than getting better because of hosting the world's biggest sporting event, problems will grow more acute as the city expands roads, builds a suburban railway and city tram network and extends its subway system.

"They say everything will be great in two years' time, but until then we will have to suffer in this city of madness," said a taxi-driver, Mr Nikos Georgiou.

He was stuck in heavy downtown traffic while road workers tore up another road under the scorching 40° summer heat that will prevail for the Games.

The organisers are as determined to showcase the Greek capital as an ideal tourist spot and ultra-modern European capital as they are to put on a trouble-free Olympics.

Organisers hope high-tech communications pioneered during the Games, a complete overhaul of public transport and a significant rise in visitors in the years after the Games will help change the face of the Greek capital.

As one of Europe's few modern capitals without a major convention centre, Athens is also poised to develop new facilities to attract year-round business tourism.

For decades, the majority of tourists zoomed briefly through Athens's antiquities before rushing off to Greece's famed sun-kissed Mediterranean islands.

The average stay in the congested capital rarely exceeded two or three days.

Pumping in money from the Greece 2004 fund of more than €1 billion, officials hope to put their city in the international spotlight much like Barcelona did successfully in 1992 for its time in the Olympic sun.

Among Athens's high-profile projects is the much-anticipated Acropolis museum, a rectangular glass building at the foot of the Parthenon temple, itself undergoing restoration.

Greeks hope the new museum will trigger the return of the temple's marble friezes, removed by Lord Elgin in the late 18th century and currently kept at the British Museum in London despite decades of demands by Greece for them to be sent back.

A grand archaeological walkway - a rare pedestrian zone in the city centre - will link the new museum with the ancient cemetery of Kerameikos and the marble-clad Panathenian stadium where the modern Olympics were revived in 1896.

As the city rushes to polish off its smog-covered beauties, hidden behind ugly post-war concrete buildings and thousands of advertising billboards, several Games venues have fallen behind schedule.

The capital's sprawling former airport at Hellenikon, a stone's throw from the city centre, is to be turned into a major Olympics sports complex including a basketball stadium and hockey and baseball pitches.

Several venues, including the boxing arena, have either been scrapped, trimmed down or relocated.

Organisers and visiting IOC inspectors said in June that the cutbacks in venues and facilities were essential in order not to leave "white elephants" behind - useless complexes for little-played sports.

The city has its first official venue test this week with the international Athens regatta at the site of the still incomplete Agios Kosmas Olympic sailing centre.

"This will be the first time we will see exactly where we stand with this venue. The same thing will happen to all other locations in the next 24 months in order to fine-tune everything for 2004," the ATHOC official said.

Piraeus, where cruise ships will berth to offer thousands of visitors a place to stay due to a shortage of hotel rooms - most of them reserved for IOC members, VIPs and foreign dignitaries - is also having a facelift.

With most of the new and future Athens hotel rooms reserved for the Olympic family, Athenian residents have been pressed to open their homes to visitors. An ATHOC poll showed about 75 per cent of Athenians would not consider renting out their homes during the Games. - (Reuters)