ATHENS, Greece – I keep hearing how the Greeks overspent for these Olympics, most of it, I presume, in overtime the last month. I keep hearing how they’re going to be bankrupt for decades, how the original budget of $5.2 billion is now closer to $10 billion.

I’m not too worried. I don’t think the Greeks are, either.

They’ve got phone cards to bankroll it all.

The Olympics are supposed to be all about participation and inclusion and freedom of choice, and they are. In the athletic competitions. But set foot inside an Olympic venue or the Main Press Center, and suddenly those ideals become a distant memory in the name of making a quick buck.

Want to book an airline ticket to fly to an outlying venue? No problem. There’s an airline booking office in the Main Press Center. An Olympic Airways office, the official sponsor of the Games. You can book only with it.

Want to pay for it with an American Express card? Sorry, they only take VISA.

Hungry? Hope you like McDonald’s.

Thirsty? Hope you like Coke or Heineken.

But the worst example of Olympic hypocrisy has to be the phone system.

The first thing you notice in the Main Press Center, which is used daily by the 10,000 print journalists covering the Games, is the complete absence of public computers with Internet access. Want to get on the Internet? You need to buy a local Internet account, then buy a phone card to access it.

Want a cell phone? The Athens organizing committee will gladly rent you one for hundreds of dollars for three weeks. The cell phones operate on cards, too. You scratch off a number on the back, punch it into your phone and you have $7 worth of call time – which lasts, oh, anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes. It’s about 40 cents a minute to call within Greece, 80 cents a minute to the States.

You need a different card to operate the land-line phones in the Main Press Center, and yet another type of card to make a call from the phone in your room in the media village. Because while you have a phone in the room, they explain, it doesn’t actually work unless you have a card, which like the others, runs down at an alarming rate.

A few journalists tried to circumvent the system by getting cell phones in downtown Athens from companies other than Cosmote, the official Olympic sponsor.

Then they started noticing their phones didn’t always have a signal at the Main Press Center and some venues. The cell phone companies complained vehemently to the government and – what do you know? – the signals started getting stronger.

Of course, if your cell phone card from another company runs out, you’re out of luck. Mine did and I went to the press center’s telecommunications desk to buy another.

The lady took one look at my American Express card and my non-Olympic brand of cell phone, and laughed.