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.
"It is because of what we have learned in the past, when the IOC did not have the system to help in case of difficulties, that we have put in place a new structure," Felli said. "I believe it is because we put in place this structure that the Greeks delivered the games they delivered."
Athens has become the measuring stick, for good and bad. Its preparations were so troubled that the IOC considered moving the Games before the Greek organizers showed enough resolve to have everything finished.
Still, bulldozers were working on the Olympic Park on the day of the opening ceremony, and security preparations were increased at great cost as the Games approached. In the end, Athens worked, and the IOC basked in its improbable success. Beyond the scores of empty seats at many events, the Athens games went off with barely a hitch. They also came with a $12 billion price tag.
Torino's Games are smaller — the winter version always is, with a third of the athletes — and organizers said Monday that the cost would be 3.4 billion euros ($4.1 billion). But the Italian government has repeatedly trimmed the Games budget.
"The last two Games have been in cities where the Latin structure is in the culture of last minute," Felli said. "But in any situation, you cannot organize the Games in an easy way."
The drive toward these games began as an offshoot to the bidding scandal surrounding Salt Lake City. Sion, Switzerland, had been the favorite in 1999, but IOC members were said to have retaliated against the Swiss IOC member Marc Hodler, who uncovered the gift-giving frenzy that resulted in a major IOC scandal.
But Salt Lake City had been prepared to play host to the Games. Many sports sites were finished four or five years ahead of time.
Here, the luge and bobsled track had to be relocated after asbestos was found in the original site. Also, several turns had to be rebuilt after athletes were injured in the first major competition. The final test event, a World Cup luge race in November, was held with no spectators; major construction was still under way.
The speedskating oval was being finished as athletes raced there in December.
But Torino's organizing committee chairman, Valentino Castellani, insisted that the sites had been adequately tested. "I am very serene about that," he said. "We have no particular concerns."