There are 34 steps down, then a long, gradual descent of 100 meters following small floor lights through the dimness of a barrel-vaulted tunnel.
After a left turn, the archers can see the light emanating from the bottom of the tunnel, light intensified as it reflects from the cream-colored stone of a place the Greeks call Kallimarmaron, or Good Marble Stadium.
“Sometimes you don’t realize you’re an Olympian,” said archer Janet Dykman of El Monte, Calif., a three-time Olympian who made the walk Sunday.
“Then you come down that tunnel, and you’re thinking about history, about who was walking there how many years ago. How cool it is walking where ancient athletes were.”
Dykman and 63 other Olympic archers not only had the privilege of treading ancient stones but also of competing in the stadium built for the first modern Olympics in 1896–on what archeologists have found is the site of the stadium built for the track events of the Panathenaic festival, held 2,304 years ago.
The festival honored a goddess, Athena. The schedule gave women athletes the honor of being first to compete in the stadium during the 2004 Olympics.
On this opening day of the archery competition, that honor came with some bowstrings attached, as a traditional part of Greece’s natural history mixed with the man-made design of the monument to create a volatile environment.
The Meltemi, a summer wind that starts in the Aegean Sea and blows across the Attica region of Greece, arrived in full force, swirling and gusting around the stadium.
It had to make these skilled archers feel as if their sport had been reduced to the opening lines of a Longfellow poem:
“I shot an arrow into the air.
“It fell to earth, I know not where.”
The wind blew so hard it overturned a substantial wooden structure used as a blind for TV cameras.
“It spoiled the experience a little,” Dykman said.
She missed the scoring area of the target entirely with two of her 18 shots and was beaten by Alison Williamson of Britain in the single-elimination tournament. Dykman averaged just 6.7 points of a maximum 10 per shot, compared to 8.6 for her 72 shots in the qualification round, held Thursday in the still air of the Dekelia training complex next to the Olympic Village.
“The wind was just outrageous,” said Stephanie Arnold, a U.S. entrant who lost to Melissa Jennison of Australia. The third U.S. woman, Jennifer Nichols, won her match with an 8.9 average in the morning, when stifling heat rather than wind was the problem.
Archery is one of the few contemporary sports that could take place in the elongated horseshoe of a stadium, also used for the track and field events of the first modern Olympics in 1896 despite a track that is only 200 meters long with squashed turns.
But there also is mythological symbolism involved to explain the presence of archery: ruins of a temple to Artemis, goddess of the hunt, were found on the hill above the stadium’s south rim.
“It is an amazing venue,” Arnold said. “We had seen pictures of it to do visualization exercises, but pictures don’t do it justice. It’s breathtaking.”
Some of the archers first saw it during a test event last November. The rest got their first live look during practice Saturday.
“That was our `oh, wow, this is neat’ moment, so we wouldn’t be thinking about that when the competition began,” said Arnold, an assistant to the mayor of Portland, Ind.
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Jennison brought her camera to the practice day.
“I was all goose-bumpy,” she said. “It was awesome to be back where the [modern] Games started.”
Few spectators shared that experience Sunday. During the afternoon session, when the wind tempered the effect of the sun and the marble benches were surprisingly cool, there were barely 300 people scattered across an area that can hold 7,500. Nearly all were friends, family and support staff of the athletes.
None took advantage of the best seats in the house, atop the middle of the north stand. From there, the view to the south is of the Parthenon a mile away. The climb to that point admittedly is daunting: 106 rows of steps, seven so steep one longs for a rappel rope.
On the stadium floor, flanking both ends of the area from which the archers fired at targets 70 meters away, stood two reproductions of statues from the 5th Century B.C. Each statue had two faces of the gods’ messenger, Hermes–one face as a clean-shaven young man, the other as a bearded elder.
It was an artistic concept meant to show the cycles of life, which also befit archery, a sport where Dykman, 50, and Arnold, 28, can be teammates.
Williamson, 32, a four-time Olympian clearly caught the spirit of the place.
“The statues were whispering good words to us,” she said. “Words from the gods.”