Olympic Diary: Escort was easy starter

It started with the sort of line you might find in a Jeffrey Archer novel.

And it has ended with our very own little scandal, right in the middle of the Olympic press village. Yippee.

While languishing on lager at the village pub, a woman approached with a sort of "do you come here often?" type line.

"And what do you do, madam? Journo? Photographer? Please tell."

She was to the point. "I'm an escort."

I replied: "That's a sort of car, isn't it?"

Unfazed by the poor humour, she uttered another line that included something about a jump.

Overcome with the Olympic spirit, I did a Bob Beamon impersonation, landed about 25 feet short of his remarkable 1968 leap at Mexico, and inquired if this was the sort of jumping she was on about. Definitely not.

How much does this particular make of escort cost? $500. For an hour. Now that is an expensive long jump. Start converting that into New Zealand dollars and it doesn't bear, or bare, thinking about.

But she had a sales pitch. "For that you can have just about anything you want."

She then high-heeled it back to a table to join four comrades, one of whom had displayed an Olympic-class thirst throughout the night and was hardly hiding her lights under a bushel.

The point of this tale is that it's a way of introducing the subject of security (or, in this case, the lack of security), which is a priority at these Games and in evidence everywhere.

It also extends deep into the waters of Sydney Harbour, and can drop without warning out of the skies as residents near the Blacktown softball venue found when the forces dealt with a mock terrorist situation. Only the local mayor had been given prior warning that the choppers were landing.

There are even high fences with barbed wire around our press compound, which was once a nurses' home, and people religiously check passes at the gates.

The accredited press passes are your most valuable item. Without them, you might as well park up at home and watch the telly.

At the Games sites, there are fixed metal detectors at every entrance point, and bags are passed through x-ray machines. The slightest beep brings forward a security guard or police person with a hand-held detector which is swept around the body.

The security man I encountered last night looked decidedly weary of it all and appeared to be in the early throws of suffering security-guard elbow. And the Games haven't even begun.

"I've done millions of these. I could do them in my sleep," he reckoned as he wafted a very poor-looking backhand around my body.

You become an expert at detaching and reattaching items about your person for the security checks, and at scooping all the coins out of a pocket in one go and into a little container so the beeps won't go off.

It will take the endurance of a marathon runner for security people to keep this up. It is hard to see how it will not cause some headaches and delays as hundreds and thousands of spectators flock through the gates.

About $40 million has been spent on security and it is, sadly, vital.

But it clearly failed at the press village when a fleet of escorts were allowed in, and there has been a sequel.

A former Auckland journalist, Colin James, wrote a column for his Australian paper, and the Olympic organisers decided to investigate.

A top security officer has apparently been tracked down as responsible for gaining passes for the women.

Unhappy simply with the Games, the security chap tried to turn it into the Fun and Games - earning a bit on the side by helping sell a bit on the side. He is expected to win deselection from the security team.