ATHENS, Greece - If an athlete triumphs in an arena, and there’s no one there to see it, does he or she still win a gold medal?

It hasn’t gotten quite that bad here in the place where spectator sports were born and where, 3,000 years later, they have come back to languish on life support. There have been at least some spectators — sometimes numbering in the hundreds — for every event.

Other than some landscaping issues — a dust bowl around the Olympic Stadium instead of grass or pavement isn't an aesthetic success — the Athens Olympic Organizing Committee did a remarkable job of pulling these Games together after six years of delays. The transportation system works. The venues are in terrific shape. The competition is, well, Olympian.

But it’s as if all of Athens’ effort and money were expended just to build the world’s largest television studio. The organizers claim they have sold 2.9 million tickets — about a third of what Atlanta sold and 40 percent of Sydney’s. But finding the fans who bought them is another thing. One place they aren’t is in the stands.

The International Olympic Committee has noticed and is more than concerned. Its sole product is what it presents as the most important competition on earth. But if you’re watching at home, you have to wonder how important it can be if all you see in the background is an endless expanse of empty seats.

Seoul solution
The IOC is already pushing what could be called the Seoul solution to the Athens organizers. Faced with a similar lack of spectators, the organizers in Korea rounded up school kids and bused them to events and handed out free tickets to off-duty soldiers.

So the world’s worst job isn’t selling shade on the dark side of the moon. It’s scalping tickets at the Athens Olympics.

Other than the opening ceremonies, which always sell out, Athens has been incapable of filling its sparkling venues. At every other Olympics, swimming is a guaranteed sell-out, and tickets for the tumbling pixies are harder to get than straight answers from a political press secretary.

Not so in Athens, where the women gymnasts went through their qualifying competiton in front of a crowd that filled at most a third of the arena. Swimming, likewise, didn’t sell out, even with a relatively small stadium and Michael Phelps aiming at the record books.

The archery competition is being held in the narrow old stadium that hosted the first Modern Games in 1896. A more historic and picturesque venue doesn’t exist, with the Parthenon and the Acropolis — one of the most stunning man-made sights in the world — providing the backdrop. Spectators there number in the hundreds. It’s not a crowd. It’s barely a decent cocktail party.

Excuses aplenty
The Athenians have a lot of excuses for what’s going on. One is that they never expected big crowds for some of the more obscure sports. But they’re not getting anyone to the big sports, either. The USA-Puerto Rico men’s basketball game won by Puerto Rico was played in a building too small for any big-time college team. And it was perhaps 70 percent full. A day later, the USA-Czech Republic women’s game was witnessed by thousands of empty seats.

Locals point out that the Olympics were scheduled for the same two weeks in August when most Athenians head for the beaches and islands on their vacations, so there aren’t as many people here to watch. More important, an average income in Greece is around $1,000 a month, about 40 percent of which goes to rent the typical apartment. That doesn’t leave the average Athenian with the discretionary income to pop for $80 tickets to the big event. Even the cheapest tickets to the most obscure events, at $11, are a major expense, especially if you’re thinking about taking the family.

Perhaps the biggest failure of the Greeks in their planning was that while they were building all the venues, they neglected to build a team. When Barcelona won the right to host the 1992 Summer Games, Spain launched a massive government-funded Olympic development program. By the time the Games arrived, Spain had its best team ever, and venues bulged with locals who came to sing ole for the home team.

But Greece has had little presence at the Games, so there’s no compelling reason to dip into the baklava jar for the Euros needed to go and cheer them on.

If something isn’t done, Athens won’t go down as the best Olympics ever, no matter how great the competition and how efficient the bus service. It will go down as a major embarrassment for the Games themselves.

By the way, the answer to the question with which this column begins is, yes, you do win a gold medal, even if nobody is watching. But you’ll feel really silly running around the arena on your victory lap, waving your flag to no one.