Athens, the host of this year's Olympics, is under much scrutiny due to its slow start and sluggish preparations, heightened security risks, and other criticisms. The focus of this article was to look at these criticisms from and to also provide some explanation as to how the games could in actuality improve not only the city of Athens but also Greek culture.
             The article describes how after winning the bid to host the Games in 1997 the Greek government took more than three years to begin constructing the massive infrastructures necessary to host the games. The slow start suggested to some officials that Greece would not have enough time to be organized by the beginning of the games. According to the article, the selection of Athens, to begin with, was a rather shaky decision due in part to the lack of infrastructures such as a highway, subways, and facilities to house the games. Athens was an urban area that outgrew its size capabilities. It was a city planned to sustain slightly over a quarter of a million people but was overwhelmed by immigration over the past 100 years. It now has a population of 10 million. The article elaborates on how the city over the past 50 years has been hit with frequent labor strikes among workers and just a culture, in general, that is very slow to start anything and then even slower to complete it.
             However, the Athens Olympic Committee won the bid due in large part to the negative stigma attached to the overly commercialized Atlanta games of 1996. The Athens organizers promoted Games that would return to the way the Ancient Games were and the First Modern Games in 1896, where they would be contested "on a human scale".
             A topic of even greater concern for these games expressed in the article is the security issue. This is the first game since 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the War on Terrorism. Although Athens is spending close to a billion dollars on security alone, they are often criticized bec...