By MIKE LOPRESTI
Gannett News Service

So now we know the ground rules, to be an American athlete in Athens this summer. Stay low. Stay wary. Stay under the radar screen. If you win an Olympic medal, do it quietly. Reluctantly. As if almost sorry.

And the American flag? Carry one, if you must. But keep it small, discreet, unobtrusive. Perhaps in a brown paper bag, like a kid slipping out of a magazine store with a Playboy.

Be inoffensive. Be unobjectionable. Be modest.

The shoe company names, though, can probably be as gaudy as you want. After all, everybody loves Nike.

It grows clearer each month the Olympics are bloated, complicated, and threatening to grow out of the control of humans. Like trying to steer a whale down a creek.

The security sticker price in Athens has gone past $1 billion. And still everybody frets if that will be enough to prevent attack by sea or air or ground.

Construction is frantic around the clock, and still nobody is sure what will work when the time comes, and what won't.

On the drug front, there are charges, counter-charges, bickering, threats to sue. New tests, and probably new ways to beat them.

And this week there was a reminder that the world is an angry place, and the United States is one of the reasons, and apparently it is up to the kayakers and cyclists and softball players to do the PR spinning.

The U.S. athletes have been asked to be kinder and gentler winners - and then, presumably, people won't hate us quite so much. Though if it were the rest of the world we're interested in satisfying, the best thing to do would be finish seventh.

Now, there is nothing wrong with stressing decorum and etiquette in victory, whether American troops are in Iraq or Iowa. And there is no question that some Yank winners in the past have acted like knuckleheads.

But when the time comes that a kid has to think twice before carrying an American flag in a parade or a victory lap, then matters have taken a turn for the preposterous.

But it is all part of a day's work in the modern Olympics. I am not sure how much longer the Games will have broad enough shoulders to bear what they are asked to carry. The financial demands. The construction requirements. The terror threats. The geopolitics. The drug cat-and-mouse.

All for 17 days of synchronized swimming and modern pentathlon.

Watching the chaos and concern surrounding Athens, you wonder if there is a city on Earth anymore that can host this thing without becoming a basket case.

New York City wants a piece of the action, anyway. The bid is not without its merits. But because New York endured the most infamous terror strike in history, a NASA computer may be needed to imagine what the security price tag would be by 2012. Perhaps the most comforting thought would be knowing any potential terrorists are probably going to get stuck in traffic.

The Olympic Games have yearned to remain an indispensable global showcase, even as they have tried to reinvent themselves. Now that their original mission as a tribute to amateurism is as obsolete as the mile run.

Maybe they pull it off, maybe they don't. But beyond question is how their stature in a cable-TV world makes them enormously expensive, complex, risky. And perhaps dangerous.

All of that is now a part of Athens. A place where it will be thought prudent this August to have machine guns, helicopters, tanks, warships, bomb squads and bioterror units conspicuous.

But not the American flag.