But the fact remains that just months before the torch was to be lit, when Athens 2004 president Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki should have been rehearsing her lines for the opening night, she was countering bad headlines with blustery statements that betrayed a mix of relief that progress was happening and indignation that anyone should think it wouldn't.
"On Monday the roof of the main Olympic Stadium began moving into place," she said. "Many said, 'thank heaven' that this progress is finally being made. And we agree. But we also believe that so many people have been looking at the sky waiting for the roof to move, that they have lost sight of the progress being made here on the ground, all around them."
Leaving aside the question of whether or not the games would happen, CM went in search of the answer to the simple question: why has it been such a white-knuckle ride?
Here is what we discovered: They started late. Really late. In meetings on 12 May to convince the IOC coordination committee that the facilities would be ready on time, Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki boasted that her country had pulled out all the stops and had done seven years' work in four years' time. The question is why didn't they do seven years work in seven years time?
Professional procrastinators
Athens won the bid in 1997, but two years later they were still drawing up a game plan, according to well-known industry figure Alan Crane, who was invited to be a main speaker at a conference in the summer of 1999 designed to discuss how Athens would deliver the facilities in time. In typical Crane fashion he told them that if they wanted to finish by 2004 he wouldn't have started from there.
"Other cities had started six or seven years in advance and still struggled," he said. "And here we were in Greece with the slowest construction process known to man."
At the time Crane was MD of Christiani & Nielson. With a joint venture partner, C & N had done a substantial amount of public infrastructure work in Greece.
At the Sydney Olympics in 2000, the main stadium was completed 18 months before the games began, allowing time for a number of major events to test it.
In Athens, the contract to construct the main stadium was signed only 18 months ago.
Crane said starting late is part of the culture. The conference itself was due to start at 9:30, with a short break for lunch, and finish at 2:30pm. In the end it started at 11 because a speaker from a government ministry was late, broke at 2:30 for lunch and finished at 6pm.
"That is Greece," Crane said.
But it's more than just a picturesque predilection for procrastination. Bloomberg reports that political infighting among ministries played a part, as did the government's herculean efforts to control spending in the run up to joining the European single currency.
There have also been design issues. Take the main stadium, with its massive, double-arched roof designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. It was to be covered with glass until the Greek government stepped in and demanded a different material for safety reasons. UK firm Palram won the contract in late 2003 to manufacture UV-blocking polycarbonate panels. They were manufactured in Doncaster in February. Last month the panels were still in Yorkshire as Palram waitied for the go-ahead from Athens to transport and install them.
But the principal delay has been institutional – the system for awarding public contracts. This process is prone to delay because as soon as the government announces the winner, any unsuccessful bidders can mount a legal challenge to attempt to overturn the decision.
The system was designed to be fair and transparent. Crane said that the pre-qualification criteria are entirely quantitative, so that criteria like 'experience' and 'company culture' cannot be factored in. The result is long tender lists because if a company meets the criteria it cannot be excluded. Then, once the government selects a winner, the winning bid is open for all to peruse. The losers have a right to challenge the decision. They often do.
That's precisely what happened to the firm Michaniki who, in a joint venture, built the 50,000 sq m press centre for the Athens games. The job was completed in time but George Vrachnis, spokesman for the company, said legal challenges to the contract award put the start date back months.
"If you lose a year or so before you start digging you're going to have a problem," he said. "That was the main obstacle. None of the Olympic projects started before 2000. It took three years to finalise all the tenders."
The system is common to countries with a codified legal system like France and Spain.
"It's just that the Greeks make a bigger meal of it," Crane said.
His advice to the conference in 1999 was to get around the law of the land by appointing one person with overall authority for building the facilities, someone who could, in effect, build by decree. He said that's what happened in Barcelona in 1992, when the mayor took charge of preparing for the Olympics. At that time, Crane was leading Bovis International, who was involved in building the Barcelona facilities.
So how was his advice received at the conference in 1999?
Anti-greek agenda?
"About 50% of the audience applauded and 50% derided it, including the keynote speaker who was the president of the Bank of Greece. They had a more laid-back attitude and they said they didn't need a foreigner coming round telling them how to do things."
Charilaos Goritsas, understandably, comes to the defence of the Greek construction industry. Until recently the president of a major Greek contractor, Empedos, he is currently president of the British Hellenic Chamber of Commerce, and a member of Greece's equivalent of the Major Contractors Group. He maintains that once the contracts are awarded, Greek companies can build as fast as, or even faster, than British companies. And he accuses the English-speaking media around the world of pursuing an anti-Greek agenda.
But Goritsas does admit that the root problem is the tender process, which he calls "ridiculous". He said that once the dust from building the Olympic stadia has cleared, the government plans a much-needed review of the tendering system.
"In the name of transparency they created a bureaucratic monster," he said.
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Construction Manager
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