Numbers finally add up for new stadium

ATHENS, Greece — More than 1,000 additional tickets for the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies will go on sale Monday.

The extra tickets for the ceremonies, as well as track and field events, were made available after the seats were installed in the main stadium and counted — with 538 more than originally planned.

The stadium had faced years of delays and problems with putting in the seating.

So far, more than 2.2 million of the 5.3 million tickets have been sold. Organizers said sales have increased rapidly in the last few days with 12,000 to 13,000 tickets sold per day.

Athens hit with phone failure

Nearly 50,000 telephones at Olympic sites and parts of Athens went dead for more than 10 hours Thursday, officials said.

The outage follows a July 12 electricity blackout across southern Greece that raised concern over the stability of public utility networks ahead of the Aug. 13-29 Games.

The phones went down during attempts to upgrade the system, officials said.

“Some 48,000 fixed-line phones stopped working during work to improve a telephone switching center,” Christos Malapanis, an official at the Greek Telecommunications Organization, or OTE, told state-run NET television.

Company officials told The Associated Press that sites affected included the Olympic Village, which opened last week, a media village, and four other games facilities. A back-up network kept about half the telephones working at the affected sites, the officials said.

Ex-Coug to help broadcast

Former Olympian Dawn Allinger Lewis, a member of the 1991 Washington State women’s basketball NCAA Tournament team, will return to the Olympics as the team handball analyst for NBC Sports.

At the 1996 Olympic Game in Atlanta, Allinger Lewis was a member of the U.S. handball team that earned an eighth-place finish. She also is a three-time gold-medal winner at the U.S. National Team Handball Championships.

Allinger Lewis, who played for WSU from 1988-91, started every game during the Cougars’ 1991 run to the NCAAs. She earned Pacific-10 Conference All-Academic honors three times and was selected to the WSU All-Decade Team.

Allinger Lewis began playing handball in 1991 and joined the national team in 1993. She has since played in over 100 international games and was a member of the 1995 Pan American gold-medal team and the 1993 and 1995 teams that participated at the World Championships.

Allinger Lewis played professional handball from 1996-98 in Norway, where she also coached handball and basketball teams.

Most recently, she received MVP honors at the 1994 and 1999 U.S. National Championships and was a member of the 1999 and 2003 Pan American teams that placed fourth.

The 2004 Olympics take place Aug. 13-29.

Backley to retire

British javelin thrower Steve Backley, a three-time Olympic medalist and former world-record holder, said he will retire after the Athens Olympics.

Backley, 35, won silver medals at the 1996 and 2000 Olympics and bronze at the 1992 games. He also won silver medals at the 1995 and 1997 world championships.

He set the world record three times.

Backley made the announcement on the eve of today’s Crystal Palace meet in London, where he will be making his final British appearance.

“I have enjoyed a fabulous career and hope to end it on a real high by winning another medal in Athens,” Backley said. “I have so many unforgettable memories, but setting the world record is a special one that I will live with forever.”