ATHENS, Aug 17: Athens Olympic organisers have started a fightback to favour with a long weekend of successful test events that has partly made up for a disastrous start to the Games trials.

While criticism and post-mortems on setbacks earlier this month in the test programme still went on, hard-pressed organisers of next year’s Games won breathing space on Sunday.

“We know we made mistakes at the start but we think we have started to come back,” an Athens Games official said.

In the first week of the test events, meant to show the state of preparedness for the Games with just one year left, the German rowing team came down with food poisoning and questions were raised about the site of the rowing venue when two days were lost because of strong winds.— Reuters