Athens' Olympic race against time will go right to the wire

While the flame will make it on time for the opening ceremony of the games on Friday August 13 in Athens, it is increasingly likely that the authorities in charge of the Olympic construction won’t.

Of 39 big building projects planned for the Olympics, 15 have been completed, nine are on time and 15 are behind schedule, raising the spectre than many events will take place in half-finished locations.

The main Olympic stadium in which the opening ceremony will take place and where the flagship track and field events will be held, remains in shambles. Many of its original features, including its roof, have been jettisoned or scaled-back.

The state of the Aquatic Centre, which will house swimming and diving, is little better. The Greek authorities finally gave up on it last month. It won’t now have a roof, leaving swimmers and spectators unprotected against the weather. Broadcasters are complaining that the events will be hard to televise because of the glare from the water; in the unlikely event of bad weather, many events could be ruined for spectators.

It is unsurprising that organisers in Athens are in a state of near-panic. A piece of black humour currently doing the rounds summarises matters neatly: "The good news is that Athens’ Olympic stadium is nearly ready; the bad news is that it is not the main Olympic stadium, but rather the Panathenaic Stadium, which housed the first modern Olympics in 1896, 108 years ahead of schedule for the 2004 games."

In stark contrast, the Chinese are almost as far ahead in their preparations as the Greeks - and Bejing doesn’t host the games until 2008.

Athens was awarded the Olympics partly, some say, out of guilt that it was beaten by Atlanta to host the centenary event in 1996, 100 years after the first modern games were held in Greece.

While the Greek economy has come a long way since the bad old days of the 1980s, it remains poor by European Union standards, with its citizens suffering from the second-lowest national income per person.

It was therefore always going to be a challenge to prepare Athens for the games.

Unfortunately, the preparations got off to the worst possible start. Incompetence and bureaucratic bungling meant that building work did not begin until 2000, three years late, a delayed start which continues to haunt the organisers today.

The preparations were given some much-needed impetus in February when the centre-right New Democratic party took power from the old socialist government, which was responsible for the disastrous management of the Olympics in recent years.

The new prime minister, Kostas Karamanlis, has taken personal responsibility for the Olympic project.

While this is the kind of commitment political leaders frequently make when things go wrong, Karamanlis does seem serious and has already had a positive impact on the preparations. After his first meeting with Karamanlis, Jaques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), said: "Our experts have confirmed to us that while a lot remains to be done, there is still time for the preparations to be successfully completed if all energies are mobilised and focused in a common direction."

To do that, Karamanlis emphasised recently, Athens needed "extremely tight deadlines". In an emotional appeal to the good-nature of his fellow countrymen, he also argued that Greeks can perform miracles when they work together.

Another big headache for Karamanlis is that security experts are warning the games will be a tempting target for terrorists because of Greece’s porous borders and proximity to the Middle East.

Greek officials say they are spending more than any other Olympic host on security. But many Greeks and foreign athletes remain sceptical that the government has enough time left between now and August to ensure security.

The main lessons from the games so far is that projects where the private sector has had the most leeway and incentive to succeed have been the most successful; those where government officials have been the most involved have been disasters.

The new Athens airport, a joint venture between the government and a consortium of private firms headed by Hochtief, a German company, opened three years ago. As part of the deal, the Hochtief consortium will be paid the income from the airport, which was always a good incentive to get it done on time.

The new metro subway system, which was financed and built by a similar public private partnership, has also been a success.

But some of the more traditional forms of procurement have ended in tears, largely because the government handed contracts to the wrong people.

After more than a year of denying the obvious, the socialist government was forced to dismiss European Technical, the construction firm in charge of bringing the Olympic marathon route up to scratch. Its workers kept going on strike, causing traffic jams. The firm has now gone bankrupt, owing its staff several months’ wages.

Progress has also been delayed by the collapse in December 2003 of Evropaiki Techniki, a small construction firm, whose employees suffered the same fate.

A big mistake was to hand out road refurbishment contracts to many tiny firms, rather than to the big contractors favoured for the sporting venues. One such minnow, a small company called Evropaiki, was meant to widen and resurface a 17km stretch of the 42km marathon route. The deadline for the project was April; in the end, at the beginning of March, the contract was taken over by J&P Avax, a much larger construction company that was successfully entrusted with the construction of the weightlifting and wrestling stadiums.

As Sydney, Atlanta and Barcelona have shown, there are long-term benefits to hosting the Olympics. But the real question is whether the benefits are greater than the costs.