The 2004 Summer Olympics, formally recognized as the Games of the XXVIII Olympiad, took place in Athens, Greece, over a phase of seventeen days from August thirteen to August twenty, 2004. Designers predicted 10,500 athletes (in reality 11,099 contended) and 5,501 team representatives from 202 nations. Athens 2004 manifested the first time since the 1996 Summer Olympics that all nations with a National Olympic Committee were in presence. There were totalities of 301 medal proceedings from 28 diverse sports.

Athens was selected as the host city at the 106th IOC Session that took place in Lausanne on September 5, 1997, after unexpectedly losing the tender to arrange the 1996 Summer Olympics to Atlanta almost seven years previously, on September 18, 1990, at the 96th IOC Session in Tokyo. Athens, in the bearing of Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, engaged in another tender, this time for the permission to host the 2004 games. The victory of Athens in acquiring the 2004 Games were mostly due to Athens' petition to Olympic history and the stress that it put on the key part that Greece and Athens had in the propagation of the Olympic Movement. "After topping all voting series, Athens comfortably routed" Rome in the 5th and final vote. Stockholm, Buenos Aires and Cape Town the three other cities that completed the IOC pick outs, were purged in previous rounds of voting. Six other cities put forward applications, but their tenders were not accepted by the IOC in 1996. These cities were Seville, Saint Petersburg, Istanbul, San Juan, Rio de Janeiro and Lille. [1]

NBC Universal gave the IOC with $793 million for U.S. broadcast privileges, [2] the highest amount given by any country. NBC made it achievable for the association to broadcast over 1200 hours of exposure for the duration of the games, three times of what was broadcast in the U.S. four years before. Among all the NBC Universal channels (USA Network, Bravo, Telemundo, CNBC, NBC & MSNBC) the games were broadcast twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. After the September 11, 2001 tragedy, apprehensions about terrorism were far greater. Greece raised the finances for defense at the Olympics to €970 million (US$1.2 billion). About 70,000 police officers guarded Athens and the Olympic site throughout the Olympics. NATO and the European Union also gave insignificant maintenance, after Athens requested for collaboration.

When the International Olympic Committee articulated its apprehension about the development of the building of the new Olympic sites, a fresh Organizing Committee was set up in 2000 under President Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki. During the period before the Games, Athens was altered into a city that made use of high-tech equipment in transport and inner city expansion. Some of the most contemporary sporting sites in the world were constructed to host the 2004 Olympic Games.

By late March 2004, some Olympic schemes were still pending on the agenda, and Greek officials declared that a roof it had originally planned as an elective, unimportant tangent to the Aquatics Center would no longer be constructed. The central Olympic Stadium, the selected venue for the opening and closing ceremonies, was finished only two months before the games began, with a descending ultra modern glass roof designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Other innovations, like the streetcar bridging the airport, the sports ground and the city, were mostly incomplete a mere two months previous to the opening of the games. The following speed of groundwork, though, made the dash to conclude the Athens sites among the most nail biting ones in Olympic history. The Greeks, untroubled, declared that they would put it together all along. By July/August 2004, all sites were complete: in August, the Olympic Stadium was formally finished and opened, connected or heralded by the formal finishing and initiation of other sites in the Athens Olympic Sports Complex (OAKA), and the sports arenas in Faliro and Helliniko. Late July and early August saw the Athens Tram and Light Rail on the tracks, and these two transportation systems finally bridged Athens with its sea front population along the Saronic Gulf, such as its port city of Piraeus, Agios Kosmas (venue of the sailing competition), Helliniko (the location of the former international airport which now contained the venue for fencing, the canoe/kayak slalom site, the indoor basketball stadium seating 14,500, and the softball and baseball arenas), and Faliro (venue of the taekwondo, handball, indoor volleyball, and beach volleyball competitions, as well as the freshly-rebuilt Karaiskaki Football Stadium). The improvements to the Athens Ring Road were also carried out in the nick of time, as were the arterial highway advancements bridging Athens proper with tangential places such as Markopoulo (venues of the shooting and equestrian competitions), the freshly-rebuilt Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport, Schinias (venue of the rowing competition), Maroussi (venue of the OAKA), Parnitha (venue of the Olympic Village), Galatsi (venue of the rhythmic gymnastics and table tennis competitions), and Vouliagmeni (venue of the triathlon competition). The rebuilding of the Athens Metro was also finished, and the new lines were opened by mid-summer.

For the first time the Olympic Flame traveled around the world. The lighting rite of the Olympic flame ensued on March 25 in Ancient Olympia. For the first time ever, the flame journeyed all over the world in a dispatch to previous Olympic cities and other large cities, before coming back to Greece.

EMI put out Unity, the formal song album of the Athens Olympics, in the prelude to the Olympics. It includes songs by Sting, Lenny Kravitz, Moby, Destiny's Child, Hikaru Utada and Avril Lavigne. EMI has guaranteed to contribute US$180,000 from the album sales to UNICEF's HIV/AIDS campaign in Sub-Saharan Africa. [3]

As a minimum 14 people were killed for the duration of the construction on the facilities. Most of these people were not from Greece. [4] Before the games, Greek hotel employees carried a sequence of one-day strikes over salary disagreements. They were demanding a considerable increase for the time duration of the games taking place.

Bibliography

1. International Olympic Committee - Athens 2004 - Election
2. NBC Universal rings in Athens profits by Krysten Crawford, CNNMoney.com, August 30, 2004.
3. Unity Olympics Album. The Star Online eCentral.
4. Workers in peril at Athens sites, BBC News Online, July 23, 2004.

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