Movable feat: the insanity of relocating the Olympics every four years.

• Author: Larson, Christina

In late March, I found myself among a busload of foreign journalists in Athens looking for something interesting to write about the upcoming Olympics. Each time we passed a bulldozer shoveling dirt or a crew with jackhammers stirring dust at one of the city's many construction sites, we'd all crane our necks and scribble notes. One British photographer pressed his camera lens against the window and snapped a round of photos as we caught a glimpse of the cranes still suspending the dramatic arching steel beams of the unfinished roof of the main Olympic stadium. An American reporter asked if the Brit would sell some of his photos to her newspaper. Her editor, she explained, was looking for the same story--documenting the construction delays. At night in the Athens hotel, reporters frantically compared notes about which projects were most behind as they raced to meet their filing deadlines.

Every big news story develops a narrative, an agreed-upon dramatic are that daily journalists attempt to advance. In the lead-up to this summer's games, the consensus story line has been: Will Athens be ready? This theme took shape because Greece was, indeed, appallingly slow to initiate the hundreds of infrastructure projects that will be necessary to host the games--from building the massive Olympic aquatic center to widening the ancient marathon route between Marathon and Athens. Greece had also been dogged by "November 17," a dangerous home-grown terrorist organization, which the country's security forces busted only in 2002.

But in recent months, the Greeks have dune a reasonable job of catching up. Greece is now spending at least three times what Australia paid for security during the Sydney Olympics in 2000, and has involved NATO forces in the effort. And the vast majority of building projects are now virtually complete--sans, perhaps, certain nice-but-not-strictly-necessary adornments, like monuments outside the stadiums and sod in the median strips. Ks one of the Olympic general secretaries, Costas Cartalis, told BusinessWeek, "The isle is not construction anymore. The issue is putting together all the different bits and bytes."

Indeed, while many foreign journalists have wandered about Athens with stopwatches observing the concrete drying, few have focused on the one factor most likely to cause snafus during this summer's Olympics: inexperience. In these games, as in all previous modern Olympics, the vast majority of the staff who work the events--the bus drivers, the food vendors, the traffic cops, the military officers manning" the security command centers--have never done this before. It is this lack of previous experience that has caused or contributed to the most famous problems that have befallen modern Olympic games, from lost bus drivers in Sydney to the failure to prevent a terrorist bombing in Atlanta.

The heart of the problem is that the Olympics--for no unassailable reason--alters its location every four years. With every change of venue, millions of staff-hours of know-how are lost. That's not how most other major sporting events are organized. Professional golf tournaments return to the same courses year after year, allowing the staffs there to learn from their mistakes. Same with tennis: The groundskeepers at Wimbledon have had decades to practice pulling out the rain tarps and emptying out the parking lots. Yet the Olympics tries to reinvent the wheel every time, fielding a new...