Great stadium comes back to life for day

OLYMPIA, Greece - Sit down on the grassy embankment, and it takes only a minute.

The ghosts come to life. Hercules sprints barefoot to the finish line.

Imaginary contestants pay homage. Nike is the winged goddess of victory, not a shoe company.

Sorry, but Bank One Ballpark will never seem the same.

``It's a holy place here,'' said Ilas Zapantis, a shopkeeper in town. ``This is the birthplace of the Olympics. We are just Greeks with technology.''

The Athens Games jumped up in class on a surreal afternoon in Olympia, a remote village more than 200 miles from the host city. They staged the shot put in the cradle of sport, in a tiny outpost that keeps its spirit burning hotter than the Olympic torch.

Forget about the hockey stadium built inside a mountain in Norway. Hand Greece the gold medal now. There will never be another Olympic venue like this one.

``I was walking from the field, through the tunnel, into the stadium and I felt like `Gladiator', my favorite movie,'' Croatian shot putter Edis Elkasevic said.

So, where you do begin? Here, you start with the truth.

Walking to the ancient Olympia grounds, you move with the masses, crossing a bridge over a dead river, shuffling along on an asphalt path shaded by olive trees.

When the path finally descends, it opens into a sun-baked valley, revealing nothing but a simple dirt track two football fields long and 30 yards wide.

The initial thought is almost shameful.

That's it? Get closer, though, and the world begins to change. The marble starting blocks, the ones that ancient Greeks toed all the way back in 776B.C., are miraculously in place. There is the dramatic stone archway that served as the official entrance to the stadium. Behind that, an expansive collection of ancient ruins, with towering columns serving as exclamation points from another civilization.

Suddenly, the mind-blowing span of history comes to life, humbling anyone who has grown accustomed to measuring life in 20-second timeouts.

By way of comparison, America was founded in 1776. That was 10 years after souvenirs of ancient Greece began to emerge, unearthed by farmers suddenly puzzled by all the marble buried deep in their soil.

``This is life; this is death; this is history,'' said Greece native Iannikis Michalopoulos, gesturing to the ruins below. ``This is Greece. This is who we are.''

If sports were born in Olympia, this athletic proving ground is also the template for all modern stadiums. There was a tunnel for competitors, separate sidelines and inclined seating on each side of the field. Every NFL stadium owes a debt of gratitude.

On their way to the venue, the last thing competitors saw was a row of statues warning them against the temptation to fix sporting matches. In the modern era, this is akin to signs in clubhouses warning baseball players not to bet on their own games.

The ancient Greeks could be decadent and violent, but they were way ahead of their time. They ran a continuous sporting festival in this place for nearly 1,200 years before earthquakes, floods and invading armies turned it to buried rubble.

Yet on Wednesday morning, U.S. shot putter Kristin Heaston was drawn first, and she became the first athlete in 1,611 years to compete on the hallowed ground. This was ironic, seeing that women were banned even from watching the ancient Games, and those that were caught were thrown off a cliff.

``Nobody's throwing my big booty off a cliff,'' said Heaston, who is 6-feet tall, 275 pounds. ``I may have something to say about that.'' Heaston had a good laugh at that, although not at her own performance ``I should've thought more about what I was doing today instead of what I was doing in history,'' said Heaston, who didn't qualify for the medals round.

Later in the day, locals continued to flock to the reopening of this sporting mecca, and the grounds were flooded with people. Suddenly, there was a bomb squad team on the premises. Extra police patrolled the grounds and security guards with rifles stood guard inside the ruins.

Zeus would not approve, but the world has changed dramatically. But this great stadium came back to life, if only for a day, and the air was thick with a mixture of awe and reverence.

``This is a historic event,'' said Chicago's Ted Karkazis, who came wearing a toga. ``I think the ancients would be really proud that what they constructed 2,700 years ago is still being used today.''

Yes, and now the Olympics have truly come home.