Olympic Games 2004

Dimosthenis Tampakos lowers his eyes when he speaks. He smiles but not easily. He considers his words carefully and does not call attention to himself. Though he is 27, Tampakos lives at home with his parents in Thessaloniki. He has become a famous athlete in his country but would prefer anonymity. "He is very modest, maybe the most modest athlete in Greece," says Ioannis Tzoustas, a press officer at the Olympic gymnastics venue and a longtime chronicler of Tampakos.

Rod Gunn had insisted that all three of his children play a sport, but he was stunned when his eldest child, Chanda, found her new athletic calling at age 14. "For the first week I walked around muttering to myself, 'My daughter is a goaltender,' " he said. "I didn't try to stop her. At the time, it was somewhat of a blessing. She had always been active and her mother had taken swimming away from her because of the epilepsy."

Janet Jackson is officially off the hook, the Athens Olympics having thrown a halftime show Friday featuring topless maidens, birthday-suited boxers and flying concrete crotches. The gods, or at least that Eros dude, would be pleased. As for the rest of us, well, what the heck? It was hot, it was late and little Michael Phelps was already in bed. As our own deity John Travolta once sang, Greece is the word.

NBC's coverage of last year's Summer Olympics in Athens topped the field Wednesday in competition for the 26th annual Sports Emmy Awards, earning 14 nominations. ESPN led the network totals with 29 nominations, compared with 23 for NBC, 18 for Fox and 17 each for ABC and HBO. The nominees for outstanding play-by-play announcer were Al Michaels of ABC and ESPN, Dick Enberg of CBS, Jim Lampley of HBO, Jim Nantz of CBS and Joe Buck of Fox.

The popular image of the Olympics is one of deafening crowds, cheering their athletes to victory. But this month, after a lifetime of training, squads of archers, fencers, gymnasts, weight lifters, swimmers and pole vaulters have flocked to Athens only to find -- well -- not very many fans. Some people might shrug off the empty seats as simply an unfortunate detail.

Well, the opening ceremony of the Athens Olympics went off Friday night, on time even, and just as everybody feared, the Olympic Stadium water pipes burst, the infield flooded, a drummer was soaked to his knees, the video board sparked fire, statues kept breaking into pieces and several performers lost parts of clothing in an unfortunate series of wardrobe malfunctions. Oh, wait. According to the official opening ceremony media guide, all that stuff was supposed to happen.

It was the perfect metaphor for a perfectly awful situation: Paul Hamm, surrounded by boos he had not caused, standing in a limbo where he did not belong. An Olympic gold medal winner being treated as if he did not exist. It happened Monday night when Hamm followed Russian star Alexei Nemov in the individual high bar finals. Thousands of fans, angered at the score given Nemov, and perhaps fueled by the controversy over Hamm's all-around gold medal from last week, booed for 8 1/2 minutes.

The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is about national pride, pageantry and anticipation. It's not, however, about athletic competition -- at least not in the eyes of NBC's Bob Costas. "I think my quote in the past was that it's part United Nations gathering and part Thanksgiving Day parade, so why don't they just have Kofi Annan and Mary Hart do it?" Costas says.

Welcoming the Olympic Games in 2004 back to their ancient birthplace and to the city where they were revived in 1896 has excited and mobilized the Greek nation. Everyone understands the great challenge of this undertaking and what is at stake. However, some have wondered whether Athens is up to the task, citing construction delays and staff changes. Others are openly hostile.

When the Olympic Games were held for the first time in ancient Greece, athletes competed nude. But the modern Games have been full of fashion moments, from the good (Florence Griffith Joyner's one-legged white lace running suits and 3-inch patriotic nails in Seoul in 1988) to the bad (the U.S. team's cowboy hats at the opening ceremony in Nagano in 1998) to the godawful (the U.S. gymnasts' beauty pageant body glitter in Sydney in 2000).

It can't hurt rugby's chances of being added to the Summer Olympics that Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, played for the Belgian national rugby team in his youth. "We'd like to think it might help," said Greg Thomas, communications manager for the International Rugby Board, "but we know we need to rely on more than that."

In response to one or more indecency complaints, the Federal Communications Commission has asked NBC to send it tapes of its coverage of the Summer Olympics opening ceremonies in Athens, the network has confirmed. Only last week, NBC's Summer Games coverage was named the family-friendliest special of 2004 during WB's broadcast of the sixth annual Family Television Awards.

Paul Hamm, newly affirmed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport as the Athens Olympic all-around gymnastics gold medalist, remains at odds with U.S. gymnastics officials over their handling of his case, another crack in the fractured relationship between the sport's governing body and a prominent athlete whose feats fill its coffers. Hamm said Thursday "there could have been more done" by USA Gymnastics to fight a challenge from South Korea's Olympic Committee on behalf of Yang Tae Young.

U.S. gymnast Paul Hamm can keep the gold medal he won in the men's all-around event at the Athens Olympics, a sports tribunal ruled Thursday in Lausanne, Switzerland.

A year and half before the Olympics returned to this ancient city, a burly FBI agent from Mississippi stepped off a plane here and began looking for trouble. Jim McGee's job was to keep terrorists from attacking the Games. Given Greece's location, porous borders and history of political violence, he feared the worst. "There was chatter that Al Qaeda recognized the Olympics were coming and that this was a target," said McGee, an 18-year FBI veteran and counterterrorism specialist.

Despite failing a test for blood doping, U.S. cyclist Tyler Hamilton will keep the gold medal he won at the Athens Olympic Games because of a laboratory mistake, Olympic and anti-doping authorities said Thursday.

In a move that wouldn't have played here 2,800 years ago, the Athens Olympic organizing committee tried to ban the local sale of the latest edition of Playboy, which has a "Women of the Olympics" section featuring photos of nude female athletes running, throwing the discus and carrying the Olympic torch. Undeterred, Playboy's target audience went out and bought tickets for beach volleyball.

The scoreboard was taking too long to acknowledge the obvious -- Aaron Peirsol's seemingly routine victory by almost 2 1/2 seconds in the 200-meter backstroke -- at the Olympic Aquatic Center. Then came the three letters attached to his name -- DSQ -- that dramatically sped up the pace of the proceedings Thursday night.

U.S. cyclist Tyler Hamilton, the gold medalist at the 2004 Summer Olympics in the men's individual time trial, failed a test for blood doping at the Athens Games and could be stripped of his medal, sources with knowledge of the matter said Tuesday. An initial test indicated the presence of someone else's blood in Hamilton's system, sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. A follow-up test was due to be conducted Tuesday.

National glory isn't the only thing being heaped on China's Olympic athletes, who are returning from the Athens Games with a record 32 gold medals. Like some of their counterparts in the West, they're being showered with cash. Gold medalists such as hurdler Liu Xiang stand to pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments, gifts and endorsements from a grateful government, an adoring public and a handful of companies eager to leave their mark on 1.3 billion potential customers in China.