2004 OLYMPIC GAMES: Keith Duggan uses his imagination to visualise an Athens Olympics of unparalleled splendour - if they can get those builders to finish in time

In the heat and dust of Athens, Olympian facts and figures fill the air to be swatted away like flies. In less than one hundred days, the Games return to their fabled home city and as of now, the Greek Olympic Committee budget is said to have overrun its budget of 1.962 billion by a further billion. There will be 57,000 beds but if the threatened tourist-industry strike materialises in August, there will be not so much as one fresh sheet.

According to the statistics, if all does somehow go to plan, 12 million meals will be served over the course of the games and 1,800 hours of television will be broadcast around the world to 200 countries. The Athens Olympic village is the most spacious and comfortable in the history of the modern games and cost €240 million.

If those figures are too cosmic, try this: the roof on the Olympic stadium is closing at a rate of three metres an hour. Its movement is too subtle for the naked eye, or even the Prada-shaded eyes of tourists that gather every hour to stare in wonder at the unholy mess that is the Olympic stadium.

Like the workers who potter around the incredible wasteland of sand and mud and heavy machinery that decorate the stadium, the roof refuses to be hurried. Work is progressing on the stadium in a manner so leisurely it is charming.

The roof has become a metaphor for the troubles in the lead-up to the Athens games. In theory, it is beautiful. It is designed by Salvatore Calatrava, a name familiar in Ireland because of his work on the James Joyce bridge on the river Liffey. In fact, the stadium concept is similar to the futuristic Dublin crossing, with two arches that appear to have been inspired by the tennis racquet Jimmy Connors used to play with. The roof is sequined with over 2,000 spotlights and any rainwater that falls during the Games will become the source for a spectacular illuminated waterfall.

It sounds gorgeous but with time ticking merrily towards the opening ceremony, the place looks hellish. After the Acropolis, the Apocalypse. The plan is the contractors will hand a gleaming stadium to the Greek Olympic Committee on July 7th. It may happen but unless the contractors have a prearranged agreement with the god Poseidon to come in and give the whole joint a thorough wash down, it is hard to imagine how.

But at this delicate stage, imagination is everything. Several times a day, bewildered international delegations are given informative and delightful tours of places like the main broadcast centre, from where the Games will be beamed around the world. The hub of the Olympian technological universe will be the master control room.

"It will be highly secured and it will have 650 monitors and will be largest master control room in the world," declared our pleasant, smiling guide with much conviction. And so it will, because the power brokers over in NBC will create havoc enough to make Zeus cower if it does not. Although on Wednesday of this week, there did not seem to be power enough to run an average electric shaver. The master control room, like the endless restaurants and the landscaped gardens and the media centre with its thousands of machines and telephone points, was simply not there. It was a big, echoing room. It is rumoured that delegates from the more linear-minded nations of the East and Scandinavia have suffered nervous breakdowns at the degree of imagination the Greeks cheerfully demand of their guests. Athens is unfortunate in that it is squeezed between Sydney 2000, reputedly the most magical games of the modern Olympic movement, and Beijing 2008, where the stadium is already rumoured to be present and perfect.

"Aah, the Olympics," laughed our taxi driver as if amused by the idea. "I think maybe it will be some trouble. The traffic, the traffic."

Taxis are stunningly cheap - the fare goes up in single cents! - and plentiful but getting around Athens is slow. A visit by the Turkish premiere on Thursday created gridlock around the city. With 10,000 athletes and five million ticketed spectators expected, the chances are there will be queues - though probably no worse than on Stephen's Green at pub closing.

The Athens traffic moves, like everything else in the city, to its own mysterious rhythms: on some streets with alarming efficiency and elsewhere, not at all. On Thursday afternoon, near the pink-bricked parliament building, a biker was sent flying across the street by a car that did not stop. It was a dramatic sight but the driver simply picked up his helmet, brushed himself down and resumed his journey, as if resigned to picking up a few bumps and bruises along the way. He offered all us rubbernecks a reassuring wave, as if to say it was no big deal.

And in fairness, it takes a lot to bother the Athenians. While news networks like CNN seemingly fixated on the minor bombs that exploded at dawn on Wednesday, the one-hundredth day before the Olympics begin, the citizens of the city reacted as if it was simply flatulence at a bus stop. An awkward moment, funny even: the firecracker that was heard around the world.

"Pah. That was cheeldren. It was nothing," sniffed a waiter at one of the sidewalk cafes in Plaqa, the heavenly old town where people gather to eat and shop in the cradle of the Acropolis.

"It was not really a bomb. And it had nothing to do with the Olympics. A local protest. It happens here all the time."

The whole issue of security hangs like a cloud over the Athens games and the Olympic guides recite the standard answers with admirable patience. Like the stadium, it is a matter of trust. They are convinced they will get it right and seem blissfully unconcerned if the other nations are slow to share that view.

And nerve-wracking Olympic build-ups have not been uncommon over the years. Many cities had their problems and there are obvious parallels between Montreal in 1976 and Athens.

"A colleague of mine was in Montreal just 80 days before the Games began and he came back to me with a dismal picture," wrote Lord Killanin in his memoir, My Olympic Years. "Even though hundreds of men were at work he could not envisage a complete stadium. Of course the stadium was not finished - the curve sweep of a tower from which the retractable roof was to be suspended had long been abandoned, but the arena was ready for the athletes, the grass having been grown elsewhere and resodded in the stadium."

However, Thomas Graham, a Canadian who was visiting Athens this week as part of a cruise tour around the Mediterranean, recalls sitting in the Montreal stadium less than two months before the Games and everything was in place. He and his wife, Margaret, attended those 1976 games and after visiting the sites for the Athens games, they grimaced politely when asked to compare. "It is going to be difficult for people, I think, with the tram system and the traffic," Thomas said.

"It's a bit of a chaotic system here. But the saving grace is that it is Athens, after all, the home of the Olympics. It is going to look wonderful and once the moment arrives, people are going to get swept up in it."

And here is the key truth. The potential for these games is amazing. Several of the other smaller venues - the shooting range, the equestrian centre and the canoeing facility are genuinely finished, no imagination required, and look splendid.

Schineas, where the rowing will take place, was created from an abandoned American airbase and is located in the foothills of the Pentelli mountains, from which the ancients carried white marble back when the Parthenon was just a young dream. On a fine August morning, with the stands full and the athletes chasing gold on sparkling waters, the scene will be exceptional. For Athens possesses what no other host city ever can: the key to the Olympic past. That is why the 2004 shot putt event, which takes place in the ancient Olympia stadium, with no electronics or artificial lighting, is set to provide the great, evocative image of these games. And the winner of the marathon, which will follow the route originally taken in 499 BC to announce the Athenian victory over the Persians, will be remembered in a way his predecessors - and successors - never could be. The race will finish at Panathinaiko stadium, where the athletes gathered in the summer of 1896 to contest the first events of the modern Olympic movement.

With such lineage, the Athenians do not need to resort to the fizzy showmanship the Americans depend on when the Games move to their cities. But for now, they are employing smoke and mirrors.

For instance, the kayaking venue was originally planned for the Pentelli mountains but although a site was landscaped, the project was impulsively shifted to the abandoned Olympic airport in the city with the result that work did not begin until 15 months ago. When the guide was asked why it started so late, he just shrugged, puffed on his cigarette and replied, "It's a Greek thing."

That is a sentiment the Irish should be able to relate to. Every nation has its quirks and curiosities and we have had the odd sporting stadium upset ourselves.

The Irish Olympic Council is approaching these games with the same sense of wry faith as every other nation. It has not been lost on Willie O'Brien, the chef de mission for the Athens games, that when the teams march into the stadium on opening night, the Irish athletes will march between Iran, Iraq and Israel. Although it is the smallest Irish Olympic team in history, it is unlikely to be missed.

The Irish delegates were shown the very rooms reserved for their athletes in the Olympic village and, as promised, the facilities are superior to those on offer in any previous games. Having visited Athens regularly over the past year, the Irish Olympic Committee members can report that progress is definitely being made on the stadium. One member remarked that it had come on significantly since May, when it "looked a bit like Lansdowne Road".

The message from Athens is they will get there, by hook or by crook. It is just disconcerting that now they have passed the 100-day watershed they are not racing around like teenagers trying to clean up the mess from last night's party before the parents arrive.

But that is not the local way. As the Greek national tourist brochure dreamily states, "Athens is neither the beginning nor the end. Athens is everywhere. In every point of the map. And every point on the map is in Athens. Because Athens is the centre of all the centres in the world." In that context, it seems only fair that the Irish Government should offer the loan of Busarus, at least for the duration of the games. But in case you are not dizzy enough, the brochure then states, "Athens is always another city. A city that does not resemble Athens. Yet it is always Athens." The point is there is no point in trying to understand. All the Athenians ask is that you place yourself in their hands. Trust. The Games will happen. It will be hot and dusty and probably a bit mad, but they promise it will be beautiful. And they have a bit of a tradition when it comes to memorable theatre.

So who knows? Magical nights in August, warmed by Mediterranean breezes and guarded by Greek gods of the city on the hill may be the lasting story of Athens 2004.

After all, the Acropolis is one of the most revered locations of the civilised world.

And it has no roof either.