ATHENS, Greece - It isn’t that women have ever numerically dominated the Olympics. They just dominate our Olympic memories.

Even if your earliest memories of the Games go back to the ’60s, that’s true. If there is one mental snapshot of that era that stands out for Americans, it is probably of Wilma Rudolph’s incredibly long legs gobbling up the track on her way to gold medals in the 100 and 200 meters.

Folks a bit younger think of Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci and Peggy Flemming and Katarina Witt and Picabo Street and Mary Lou Retton and Kerry Strug. They remember U.S. women winning team golds in basketball, soccer and softball and Florence Griffith-Joyner and Marion Jones on the track. Even back in the 1920s, when women were nearly as rare in the Olympics as dairy farms in Manhattan, Sonja Henie was the one Olympian whose name everyone knew.

This year, the first event of the 2004 Athens Games was a women’s soccer match between the United States and Greece. It is just the beginning of what will be a competition in which women will dominate the headlines, and again, the memories.

They will also dominate the viewership.

It’s hard to explain why that is. Outside of the Olympics, if you mention big-time sports to an American, he or she will most likely think of men playing baseball, football, basketball and maybe hockey. Or men driving in circles really, really fast or kicking a soccer ball or pedaling a bike through the Alps.

Women participate in sports in large numbers, but there isn’t a big market in the United States for women’s professional sports. The WNBA exists because of the support of the NBA. The WUSA women’s soccer league died for lack of paying customers.

Some women’s college basketball teams draw big crowds -- the UConn women’s team is probably more popular than the men’s team. But on the whole, it’s still a tough sell, and many schools give away tickets to women’s games just to get bodies in the building.

Not at the Olympics, where women’s gymnastics tickets are worth George Foreman’s weight in plutonium, where women dominate the story lines, when women grab the clicker from their boyfriends and husbands and lock into the Olympic broadcast.

This is particularly true among Americans who aren’t normally sports fans. And it’s likely the reason they watch the Olympics is to see women competing at the very highest levels for the glory of country and sponsors -- although not always in that order.

Male fans of the traditional team sports tend to be rather blasé or even dismissive of the Olympics. Female non-fans tend to find themselves glued to the television, addicted to their daily doses of munchkin gymnasts, gelled synchronized swimmers, and soccer, softball and basketball players settling for no makeup other than a heavy sweat gloss.

And there will be plenty to watch.

The U.S. women’s gymnastics team is as good as any America has ever sent to the Games. The women’s soccer, basketball and softball teams will get major play. In swimming, Michael Phelps’ quest to break Mark Spitz’ record of seven golds in one Olympics will be the big story, but the women will get a big share of the attention.

Cameras will focus particularly on swimmer Amanda Beard, who has posed for Maxim and admits that she enjoys European beaches where she can go topless. She isn’t the first woman to get publicity for taking her clothes off for a men’s magazine, but what shows how far women have come in sports is that no one is making a big deal about it.

The American explosion in women’s sports dates back just more than 30 years and the passage of Title IX, the law that mandates equal sports opportunities. For most of the time since then, feminists and run-of-the-mill curmudgeon columnists would erupt in righteous indignation whenever a female athlete made the mistake of showing off her body, thus raising the possibility --  if you can believe it -- that young people who are extremely fit and strong and athletic might also be considered to be sexy.

The intellectuals felt that people shouldn’t watch women’s sports because they liked looking at women, but because of women’s athletic ability. This utterly ignored the reality that since forever women have been watching men’s sports because they think young, athletic men are sexy. Ask any female football fan what she likes about the game and, if she’s honest, sooner or later she’ll admit one of the attractions tight pants on tight heinies.

But as recently as four years ago in Sydney, feminists fulminated over the Australian women’s basketball team, which took the court in skin-tight unitards. The Aussie women were offended by the criticism, feeling rather proud of the way they looked.

Today, few outside of those who make a living peddling their self-proclaimed moral superiority are even vaguely disturbed by Beard and other women who pose in less than the regulation team uniform.

It’s not a sign of the moral disintegration of America -- and the rest of the world. Rather, it’s proof that women athletes are no longer curiosities and somehow inferior to males. With that goes the recognition that athletes are sexy, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. If women can lust after Derek Jeter, why can’t guys lust after Amanda Beard?

None of this has translated into commercial success for women’s sports in general outside of the Olympics. But it has made the Olympics vastly more entertaining and extended their reach to a vastly larger audience.

What’s amazing is how long it took the International Olympic Committee and the governing bodies of the multitudinous Olympic sports to realize who the real stars of the Games are.

What’s amazing is how long it took the International Olympic Committee and the governing bodies of the multitudinous Olympic sports to realize who the real stars of the Games are.

In the beginning -- back in ancient Greece and the original games -- women weren’t allowed even to watch. When one woman disguised herself as a man to become a spectator and was discovered, the organizers made sure that never happened again by requiring the audience to wear the exact same clothes as the athletes, which was none at all.

When the Games were revived in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France and his posse of titled peers, there wasn’t a single event for women on the Olympic menu. Women, it seems, weren’t strong enough for the heavy exertions of sports, although they were more than strong enough to sweat like a marathoner at home over a hot stove and laundry and dirty floors and all the other heavy lifting involved in running a household.

It wasn’t until the ’70s that women ran a race longer than 400 meters and not until 1984 that they were considered capable of taking on the marathon.

As recently as 1972, only 15 percent of all athletes in Munich were female. Twenty-eight years later, in Sydney, male competitors outnumbered females, 68 percent to 32 percent.

This year, absolute equity has almost been achieved, with the gender split at 56 percent male and 44 percent female. Within eight years, the IOC has promised, it will be 50-50.

Today, every sport has both male and female competitors with the exception of boxing, but don’t worry, if we can have women’s wrestling added this year -- and, no, guys, there’s no Jell-O or mud or Wesson Oil involved, so don’t even think about it -- boxing can’t be far behind.

There is women’s weightlifting, women’s judo, women’s tae kwon do, women’s fencing, rowing, badminton, table tennis, shooting, archery, and team handball.

And the country whose delegation doesn’t include a woman will be rare. The Palestinians have joined the Games, and one of their two athletes in Athens is a woman. Kuwait, where women aren’t allowed to vote, hold elected office, or show a hint of an ankle in public, is sending a woman. Afghanistan, which so recently was governed by men who whipped women for showing an eyebrow, will enter the Olympic stadium behind a woman flagbearer.

Some commentators will wonder how women’s sports can be so popular at the Olympics and so obscure the rest of the time. They will conclude that this indicates some fundamental failing of our society that can be traced directly to male attitudes.

I prefer to think it’s because men care about who wins a baseball game between Kansas City and Seattle in the second week of April. Women care about who wins the gold medal at the biggest sporting event of them all.

Beyond that, I don’t care what happens the other three years and 50 weeks between Olympiads. I just know that the Olympics are here, they belong to the women and it’s pretty cool.