There is no greater evidence of the obsolescence of the Olympics than this: Not even the Greeks, who invented the Games back in 776 B.C., care about them anymore.

Attendance at the Athens Olympics is so bad even the New Jersey Nets are laughing. The Montreal Expos would be embarrassed by some of the “crowds” who have turned up – or not turned up – to witness water polo matches, archery, or even that staple of the TV Olympics, women’s gymnastics.

With the Games nearly a week old, more than half the available tickets remain unsold. Tourists have stayed away from Athens in droves, and locals have vacated the city in favor of the serene Greek Islands.

Clearly, 108 years without the Olympics was fine with Greece, which last hosted the Games in 1896. Clearly, these are people of impeccable taste and fine judgment.

Are you paying attention, New York?

The Olympics has become a spectacle and an embarrassment no truly cosmopolitan city really needs, and a security and logistical nightmare no self-respecting city should ever want.

Neither the Ancient Greeks nor those of 1896 could have conceived of Nike or Speedo, Peter Uebberoth or Dick Ebersol, NBC, CNBC, or MSNBC. They never would have believed a man with hair dyed the color of Bob Costas’s could actually exist. Who knows what they would have made of Allen Iverson?

There may not be all that much difference between the so-called Ancient Olympics and the two-week festival of greed and corruption we celebrate now – after all, a scoundrel named Eupolus of Thessaly was fixing boxing matches back in 688 B.C., thus earning the distinction of being the first known Olympic cheat – but the grime on the Games is now so thick that no amount of network and corporate scrubbing can clean it off.

Five days after the opening ceremony, we already have had Michael Phelps, 19-year-old failure; Arash Miresmaeili, Iranian spoilsport, and Allen Iverson, crybaby. Still to come are Marion Jones, the Balconic Woman, and the rest of her track compadres, who fear nothing with the possible exception of a person in a lab coat bearing a specimen jar.

Iverson, known stateside for the mantra “keeping it real,” veered off into the surreal when he compared yesterday’s basketball game between Team USA, formerly known as the Dream Team, and the hosts as a form of combat.

“We need a war,” Iverson said on Monday. “We don’t need a cakewalk and then go back to thinking everything is peaches and cream for the rest of the tournament. We need wars. And what better war than against those guys in their own house and their fans?”

Aside from being an incredibly stupid comment at a time when American men and women are losing their lives in actual warfare in Iraq, Iverson’s proclamation came on the heels of the “war” Team USA lost on Sunday to Puerto Rico. That should have been embarrassing enough. The very thought that Iverson, who gets paid $20 million to play ball in the US but not, heaven forbid, to practice! – needed to conjure up images of killing and bloodshed to defeat a team of Greeks would be, in a saner world, the very definition of shame.

So, too, would the burden placed upon Phelps, who, prodded by a swimsuit manufacturer’s offer of a $1 million bounty, predicted he would equal Mark Spitz’s record of seven gold medals in a single Olympics. Phelps even went so far as to announce “one down, six to go” after winning the 400-meter individual medley over the weekend.

Phelps won two more gold medals yesterday, and may still take home a king’s bounty of gold, but judged against his own boasts, and the expectations of the company that makes his bathing suit, his 2004 Olympics will forever be deemed a disappointment. So much for the sheer thrill of athletic competition.

So much, too, for the bonding of nations through games. Miresmaeili, who was supposed to carry Iran’s flag in the opening ceremony and was expected to win his third gold medal in Judo, instead pulled out of the Olympics when he learned his opening round match would be against an Israeli.

Instead of sanctioning Miresmaeili, his nation announced it will award him the $115,000 prize Iran pays its gold medalists. After all, Iranian law forbids any type of contact with Israelis, and Miresmaeili was just being a good citizen.

As distasteful and offensive as the actions of Miresmaeili and his nation are, in a sense they are truer to the spirit of the Ancient Olympics than the current mess NBC and its corporate toadies have come up with.

The Games were never really games, but substitutes for war among nations that otherwise would be at each other’s throats. The glory came in defeating your rival not on the battlefield, but on the playing field, or on the track or in the pool.

That kind of thing rarely matters anymore. Now, all the athletes of the world are truly united, one nation, indivisible, as good citizens of the Planet Nike. The people of Greece, remnants of the greatest civilization the world has ever known, have had the good taste and judgment to stay far away from that.

If this city gets awarded the 2012 Games, will New Yorkers be smart and discriminating enough to do the same?