There are many things that the television coverage, blanket though it is, does not show. It does not show, for instance, the wonderful sports complex that the Greeks have built, an area – the Oaka Centre – in the outer suburbs of Athens which includes between five and seven arenas, including the Olympic Stadium itself.
All this is included with a cantilevered archway curving on the left and a wall of hanging strips which undulate, making a kind of eerie music.
The Olympic Stadium itself was pre-existing but its architect, Kalatravi, came up with the idea of creating two huge arches which provide a roofing over the stadium. Everybody said he was mad, and it began to look as if he would not finish it in time. But he did it, and when the whole series of intricate and very delicate movements of the arches began, slotting each part into place, everyone remained open-mouthed.
The whole world had heard how the Greeks would not finish in time for the Olympics, but they did and they have shamed all their former critics.
Obviously, the Greeks have heavily overspent their original estimates, but most of this spending went into either sports venues which they can use for their own athletes, or in infrastructural works such as roads and a renewed underground network which got most of its stations redone up nicely.
As for roads, the Greeks had long complained, as anyone who visited Athens in the past must have done, about the sheer amount of traffic and traffic jams on the Athens roads. Now they have a new road network which links up the new Venizelos airport to the city, and a peripheral road which caters for through traffic.
The road is wide, flows and even has an Olympic lane to enable athletes and sports officials and visitors to get through to the venues on time.
Apart from the physical infrastructure, we were amazed at the sheer number of voluntary student workers they had roped in. You could see these youngsters everywhere, not just on the field, but also taking care of the guests, and, most significantly in the Oaka centre. There they mingled with the spectators, or else sat all day in high chairs, such as tennis umpires have, with a portable loudspeaker to their lips, welcoming one and all to the venue and directing the crowds to the events.
At the end of the day, around midnight and even more, they were still there to handle the outgoing crowds and wish one and all a good night.
I was a guest of Intralot, the Greek part of Maltco, the lottery people and it was a once in a lifetime experience.
Again, me and my colleague’s interest was in any Maltese participating, but the only one in which we assisted was the one on Friday night in which Tanya Blake took part.
Surrounded by a vociferous crowd of 70,000, all with their different flags in their hands, we rooted for Tanya.
Forget the ultimate result, she did very well. Her group was all bunched together and Tanya kept up the strain for the whole race, but missed out on the last sprint. Yesterday we learnt she was hit by the Moroccan competitor at the first bend, which may have impaired her performance. Surely, her worst times were better than the ones obtained by the participant who came second.
More than a stream of sports events, the Olympics is a feast of peoples, enjoying themselves in peace. People older than me still cannot recover from the shock of seeing the French and the Germans collaborating together and acting as friends. I, for my part, never expected to live through the time when there could be Americans and Russians on the same bus and everyone behaved normally with each other. There was a point where you could not even distinguish one from the other.
The Olympics bring together people from all over the world and you learn that everyone has something to contribute. You also learn that this globalised world has become a very homogenised place, which is addicted to the same brand names and exhibits all the same middle-class tendencies that we think are only our own, and has come to live in peace.
Whatever the news from Iraq, grievous though it be, the world is at peace and we still have not acknowledged enough the huge progress registered by the world since the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin wall.
The Olympics then is also the story of so many small people doing huge things. I never thought I would end up watching weightlifting, but that is what I did on Thursday, astounded that the finalists were trying to carry 200 kg, three times their own weight, seeing some of them hurt themselves as they tried the impossible.
The previous day we had assisted, astonished, at the impossible gyrations of the men’s artistic gymnastics, wondering how they could flip so many times in the air and still come down the right way. We hugely sympathised with the American who later won the gold medal, and who seemed to have lost all his chances with a bad fall in one of the disciplines.
And on Friday the whole stadium rose as a man to clap and shout encouragement at the three Ethiopians who kept running the last lap of the 10,000 metres race as if they were doing a 100 metre dash, setting up an Olympic record in the meantime.
Such are the Olympics, as they are seen in real life, not from television. If the whole aim of the Olympic spirit is to participate rather than to win, then to participate as a real spectator is far more fulfilling in enabling one to start believing once again in humanity, than to participate as a couch potato.