Family still putting on a shiny front

Tom Humphries finds Athens looking wonderful and the hosts - with a few exceptions - eager to make him feel at home

For host cities the Olympic Games are like those Sunday afternoons of childhood when your posh relatives from the southside came to visit. Tidy the place. Blitzkrieg it. Make happy with the Pledge. Call in Mr Sheen if necessary. Watch your manners. Don't ask for more. Eat what you're given.

Athens is all spick-and-span and smelling of polish. The Olympic Family are here. By their danglers shalt thou know them. Great big placards dangle from the necks of all members of the Olympic family. Getting the dangler conferred upon you is the first priority and the first test of any Olympic city.

If there are men in the woods in Vietnam still fighting a forgotten war there are surely hacks and blazers in a hangar in Atlanta still queueing for accreditation to the 1996 Games. In those days of rudimentary drug testing many world records for queueing were set. Most seem unlikely to be broken.

Not in Athens anyway. Like Sydney before it, Athens has opted to accredit people as they come off the airplane. Having taken the precaution of arriving at 2.0 in the morning, The Irish Times had its choice of accreditation staff.

"You prefer man or woman?" When it comes to danglers, beggars can't be choosers. The Irish Times shrugged wittily, was ministered to by a young man and had his Olympic Family membership hanging from his neck within 60 seconds.

Just one of 21,000 media members of the Olympic Family, all of whom are cherished equally, except NBC staff, who have the freedom of the city, and photographers, who get better gift bags, and large media organisations, which have their own offices. Still. Sixty seconds. Chaos? What chaos.

Once inducted into the family, a made guy so to speak, you just read the signs. Olympic Family this way. You can see that when Athens was cleaning up it put all its odds and ends into the back room.

There are signs at the airport. Olympic Family. No Exit. Make for a non-Olympic-Family door and it's like getting caught trying to snoop into somebody's bedroom. You need a good excuse.

Outside the air is muggy but there is a breeze. The shuttle-bus system is ambitious but the bus to the hotel cluster you have been assigned to has just gone. An hour's wait and then after you board, a good fight between the driver and the Olympic volunteers who keep anxiously glancing up at the bus and wincing.

"Ssssshhhhh," they tell the driver, pointing at the fascinated Olympic Family members with their noses pressed to the windows of the bus. He keeps shouting regardless. Even as we pull out of the shuttle bays and onto the brand new highways, which are totally devoid of cars, he keeps shouting.

Olympic accommodation is an eternal puzzle. Those who book early often get palmed off with the worst deal. There is a system of stars in place which is intended as a rough guide to the quality of the lodging. Three stars are awarded merely for allowing people inside and actually taking money from them.

We are in three-star accommodation, which as it turns out is a happy medium, as the place aspires to be two-star but charges like a four-star.

Zorba (not his real name; we have used a cheap, stereotypical Greek name to preserve anonymity) is not pleased to have to check somebody in at 4.0 in the morning. Checking people in is generally not his forte, it seems. People in fact are something he is not at ease with.

Still. Amidst all the mindless gladhanding and welcoming in an Olympic city it is indeed refreshing to find a place where plain hostility is still a virtue. No kowtowing to the Olympic spirit. No plamas.

You proffer a credit card "for extras". Zorba inspects the plastic. No extras, he says simply.

He is right. The room is where the 1970s survive. Especially if you lived out the 1970s in, say, Kiev. Yes, Kiev during the 1970s at a time when the colour orange was enjoying a renaissance.

What is the position on describing a Greek hotel room as spartan? How did the Spartans describe basic accommodation with poor decor? Did they dream of categories which would be sub-spartan. Poor man's spartan? Hack spartan?

Anyway. Pre-opening ceremony, most Olympic cities have the same feel to them. The Olympic Family, who have visited scenes of such confusion many times before, swan about, waiting and describing the waiting to each other. Athletes limber. Officials meet. Hacks tap dance.

The natives of the poor city wonder is this it? For this we cleaned the front room? For this we'll be paying extra taxes till we are old? In the media centre we talk of drugs and novelty.

There is a special kind of enthusiastic preppy young journalist I believe they breed in California and in parts of New England who actually enjoy the Games and believe every fraction of the Games they themselves cover is of global importance.

The rest of us wait for lightning to strike. Drugs or novelty. Yesterday to the press centre to do a press conference came a one-eyed American clay-pigeon shooter. How inspirational was she? Who knows? We couldn't get over the carnival aspect of it all.

That's how it goes before the opening ceremony. If you have a novel twist to your story come and tell it. It's your only chance.

Drugs of course never go out of fashion at the Olympics. We Irish have a certain cachet in this matter and have licence to bend the ears of other hacks on the topic.

What's interesting is that there is a sense that Cathal Lombard's name will be all but forgotten in two weeks' time. A conversation with one prominent tester yesterday revealed that athletics, swimming and rowing all stepped up their EPO testing in the last couple of months.

EPO testing is horrendously expensive and mostly occurs only on the samples of targeted athletes. Therefore it's not a matter of testing all samples for EPO, rather a business of trying to benefit from economies of scale by testing a lot of samples at the same time.

The results of the blitzes done by the various sports are just beginning to percolate up through the system. We wonder who's been clever and who's been careless. Will we know soon?

And tomorrow night Athens will open its front door and let everyone see the job it has done. The city looks wonderful and the Games will be enhanced by the Greek welcome.

Will that be what we remember though?