Greeks delay race with 6-minute protest

ATHENS, GREECE — Even by unpredictable Olympic standards, it was a bizarre moment in Olympic history. A bizarre six moments, to be exact. News reports have exaggerated the delay in Thursday night's men's 200-meter track final to 10, even 15, minutes. But it was six. I timed it.

The event was supposed to start at 10:50 p.m. and it was 10:50 p.m. exactly when the announcer called the runners to their marks.

On my oversized Suunto watch — the one that tells the time in three time zones, the altitude, the temperature, your heart rate, compass bearing and barometric pressure — I switched to the stopwatch mode. I like to time track races. I don't know why. My times never jibe with the actual times, especially in the sprints. The hand is not quicker than the electronic eye.

But I know it was 10:50 when the race was supposed to start and the crowd wouldn't let it.

Suddenly, it was as if the announcer had told everyone that their cars had their lights on and they were being towed. The mood turned nasty.

Seventy thousand people started chanting.

"Hellas," they shouted, the Greek word for "Greece." "Kenteris," they also shouted, the name of Greek runner Kostas Kenteris who appeared from nowhere to win the 200 four years ago at the Sydney Olympics.

In the next day's Sydney Morning Herald, the headline read: Who the Hellas Kenteris?

So incongruous was the sight of a white-skinned man from Greece winning a race dominated for so long by dark-skinned men, most of them Americans, that the questions started immediately concerning the possibility that Kenteris had used PEDs (performance enhancing drugs). This was like an Indonesian winning a cross-country ski race.

The questions only heightened when Katerina Thanou of Greece placed second in the women's 100-meter run in Sydney, another "Man Bites Dog" shocker. The fact that both Thanou and Kenteris were coached by the same man, Christos Tzekos, only added to the plot.

The problem, of course, is that four years later, neither Kenteris nor Thanou were at the track stadium in their homeland Thursday night — Thanou to run in the women's 4 x 100 meter relay (without her, Greece failed to make the finals) and Kenteris to defend his gold medal in the 200.