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Gold medal for Athens' security-with-a-smile
They worried about security for seven years and it turned out to be the least of their problems.
They worried about security for seven years and it turned out to be the least of their problems.
The cost to Athens of making the Olympic Games safe from attack was substantially more than $1 billion and was Europe's biggest and longest peacetime security operation.
There was no immediate way of knowing if the $1 billion was merited. There were no reports of planned atrocities deterred. But after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, Athens really had no choice.
The Parthenon has witnessed much over the past 2,500 years - the Roman Empire, the Byzantine and the Ottoman, and in living memory, a Nazi German occupation. There were concerns the city would again become a military camp during the 16-day Games.
Had Socrates strolled through the Agora asking penetrating questions, he might have been stopped for identification by one of the 70,000 security personnel guarding Greece.
If experience of the past three weeks is any guide, it would have been a friendly encounter. Tourists wandering the ancient streets saw little sign of the security web covering the city and its Olympic venues.
Several thousand closed-circuit TV cameras watched the city, along with police, troops, helicopters, an airship full of high-tech surveillance and an army of helpers.
NATO offered assistance for air and sea patrols. AWAC surveillance planes patrolled the skies around the clock and a special forces battalion trained to defend against weapons of mass destruction settled in Halkida, an hour from the capital.
After all the preparations the known Olympic-related death toll was three -- a cameraman collapsed and died, a man hit was by a car and a policeman died apparently in a round of Russia roulette with a bored Army buddy.
The only glitches, difficult to stop in the best of times, were ahead of Sunday's closing ceremony when Tibetan activists breached security at the main stadium complex and unfurled a flag to protest alleged human rights abuses in China, host of the 2008 Games.
A short time later, the marathon race leader, Vanderlei de Lima of Brazil, was pushed briefly off the road by a spectator wearing a kilt and green beret. The spectator was arrested and de Lima took the bronze medal.
ATHENS SPLENDOUR
Public Order Minister George Voulgarakis thanked Athenians and Olympic visitors for their patience.
"We managed what no other country that hosted the Games had to do," he said. "We let people enjoy the competition in the stadiums, the squares, the streets...in a unique environment."
Generally, the Greeks kept smiling and the Olympic visitors kept smiling back.
However, for a country of 11 million the cost was huge -- roughly four times what Australia spent to protect the Sydney Games and 30 times Atlanta's 1996 security budget in a more innocent age.
Now over $7 billion, the Greek Olympics bill is equivalent to 4.4 percent of the country's gross domestic product, which would be like France or Britain spending more than $50 billion.
The problem now is whether every bidding city in the future will have to emulate Greece's expensive blueprint.
"The security environment has obviously changed," said an official from NATO. "These Games are not taking place in the same environment that they did four years ago, let alone 20 years ago."
IOC president Jacques Rogge said the 2012 Games candidates - New York, Madrid, London, Moscow and Paris - had full scale "security systems" already in place, which was not the case with Athens, and he did not expect security costs to be so high.
NATO would consider helping China with security for the 2008 Beijing Games "if a request came", the official said. "Providing security for the Olympics is something we're all interested in."
But it would seem unlikely that China, with military manpower availability of 208 million, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, will need NATO's help with the next Games, whether or not al Qaeda is still a global menace.
