Hosting Olympic games is a colossal task for any nation, there’s no doubt about it. All the countries that have done it have discovered how difficult it is to gear up the whole state machinery for what has become a genuinely global event, viewed in homes in every country.
So staging the Olympics, after the brilliant success of Sydney, in a country of just under eleven million people overloaded with problems and with a much-deserved bad reputation in fighting terrorism, was always going to be a massive challenge, if not a gamble, for both the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Greece itself.
