July 8, 2004

TIMES HUMOR: BOROWITZ REPORT

Athens officials admit they have not begun building stadium

NBC Furious

Organizers of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens admitted today that they have not yet begun building the Olympic stadium considered crucial to hosting the summer games.

“I’d love to sugarcoat this and say that work was underway, but we have done diddly on this,” said chief organizer Stratis Stratigis.

Mr. Stratigis said that he and his associates in Athens had intended to begin work on the stadium months ago, “but we kind of got bogged down with other stuff, and so here we are in this big mess.”

While refusing to assign blame for Athens’s total lack of a stadium, Mr. Stratigis said, “In retrospect, maybe we spent too much time choosing the right font for the parking passes.”

As Olympics officials scrambled for a solution to the stadium crisis, Mr. Stratigis told reporters “if worse comes to worst, we can just hold the Olympics outside on the grass.”

But back in the U.S., NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol said he was “furious at the Greeks’ failure to break ground on a stadium with the games set to start in a mere five weeks.”

“We paid $793 million for the Olympics,” Mr. Ebersol said. “Quite frankly, when you lay out that kind of jack you expect there to be a stadium.”

NBC executives are reportedly considering a number of programming alternatives to the 2004 Olympics, including airing 400 consecutive hours of “Law and Order” and previously broadcast segments of Tim Russert talking about his dad.

Elsewhere, John Edwards today called himself a son of a mill worker and Dick Cheney agreed, but not in so many words.

For more from Andy Borowitz, go to: www.borowitzreport.com

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