Despite scramble, officials say sites are ready

TORINO, Italy — Eighteen months after the Olympics scramble in Athens, Torino is readying to stage the winter version of the games, last-minute Italian style.

The organizers proclaimed this week that the Olympic sites were finished and fundamentally sound heading into Friday's opening ceremony, although some had been tested with few spectators or with none at all.

Security, everyone was assured, was ready, although it was not as obvious in the mountains as in the city. The transportation system, charged with moving athletes, officials, spectators and members of the media through city traffic and winding mountain roads, remains a worry that even organizers admit to having.

"Organizing the games is never easy," Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, said at a news conference on Monday. "But I am glad the fundamentals are sound."

Beyond the confidence, though, Torino hummed with deadline pressure that evoked images of Athens, where everyone from bulldozer operators to tree planters worked frantically until the opening ceremony.

Torino's signature square, Piazza San Carlo, remained half torn-up to build a parking garage, forcing NBC cameras to avoid orange construction fences in shots of the "Today" show set in the other half of the square. Bulldozers in Sestriere moved snow to clear roads and pave the way for a little mountain town to welcome tens of thousands of people.

A picturesque footbridge linking the Olympic Village in Torino with the media center opened to pedestrians last weekend, although some of the decorative ironwork ends two-thirds of the way across.

Construction crews moved out of the villages themselves, in Torino and Sestriere, days before the athletes started to move in.

Yet IOC officials, who have been overseeing the work since Torino was selected as the host in 1999, say they are confident that everything will go as planned. "We are very pleased with the preparations," Rogge said. "Like any Games, the final stretch of days is the most difficult one."

After the 1996 games in Atlanta, where poor planning resulted in a collapse of the transportation system and a crash of the computer system that reported results, the IOC created the Coordination Commission, which oversees each organizing committee.

Gilbert Felli, the IOC's executive director of the games and an integral member of the Coordination Commission, said better organization had helped improve the preparations.