King Features

Trip fulfills Olympic dream -- sort of

As a youth, I would have qualified for the Olympics except for one minor technicality -- the games did not, for some reason, include pinball.

In fact, I think I would have been pretty competitive in a modern pentathlon that included pinball, Skee Ball, darts, pool and Ping Pong. All that practice gone to waste!

But at least now I can say I went to the Olympics, though in my case the qualifying round meant buying tickets for myself and my family.

Nowadays the Olympics pretty much has everything, including competitive stamp collecting, which has taken a cue from the wildly popular Beach Volleyball.

Stamp collecting -- now referred to correctly as Beach Stamp Collecting -- includes a lot of young women in bikinis jumping up and down and is expected to be one of the "hot tickets" in Beijing, along with Beach Archery, Beach Badminton and Beach Fencing. (Ouch!)

NBC officials, who have a newfound and extraordinary reverence for the history of the games, point out that the ancient athletes competed naked and that to honor that heritage modern athletes should wear as little as possible.

"We feel that, historically speaking, this is the right thing to do, even though it might harm our ratings," said an unnamed network official with a long and oddly growing nose.

But of more interest than even the Beach Volleyball contest was the question, Would the Greeks be finished in time?

This was a valid concern, since in the case of the 14,000-seat basketball venue, for example, the Greeks started on the stadium a little less than three hours before the first game.

They had hoped to have a full three hours, but some of the guys stopped for coffee.

No matter. They completed the building in time to break for lunch with the help of the Hephaestus, the ancient Greek craftsman god who came out of retirement to get things moving.

Zeus also lent a hand, hurling a few well-placed thunderbolts at the backsides of the slower workers.

But however they did it, the Greeks got it done, and the various venues were even more spectacular than they appeared on TV.

In addition to some of the events, we visited the Acropolis, site of the Parthenon.

Walking around the ruins of ancient Athens helped put 2,500 years history of Western Civilization into perspective, especially when one realizes he is walking in the footsteps of Katie Couric herself.

Katie, unfortunately, was nowhere to be found, so we went shopping on our own.

We found the shopkeepers somewhat aggressive, in the sense that the Atlantic Ocean is somewhat wet.

Walking by one store, we were lured in by the shopkeeper who promised that "everything" in the store was 50 percent off.

My wife picked up a small dish.

Wouldn't you know it? That was the one item that wasn't 50 percent off. It was full price. Amazing.

And so was the whole trip. I just wish I could have gotten there on my pinball skills -- but there's always Beijing.

Write to Don Flood in care of King Features Weekly Service, P.O. Box 536475, Orlando, FL 32853-6475, or send e-mails to dflood@ezol.com