SCARLET FACES IN ATLANTA

Yesterday's Olympic bloomers

Cockroaches in the rooms, poor food and chaos at the Games venues have led to more than 300 police officers packing their batons and quitting their posts as volunteer Olympic security guards.

"It took four days to get a housekeeping crew here to clean the toilets," Shirley Resnick, a Miami policewoman staying in one Atlanta dormitory, said.

If Resnick had her way the people who prepare the food for the lawmen taking a busman's holiday would be locked up. "Over here it's garbage - turnip greens, collard greens. And I'm a vegetarian," she said.

The man with the problem of arresting the walk-outs is A D Frazier, the chief operating officer of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, who has lost 306 of the 2,248 security volunteers he started with.

"As in any undertaking, expectations in some cases are met - in some cases met handsomely - and some others were not met," Frazier said.

Donald Besse, a deputy sheriff from Larkspur, California, had little time for the moaners in blue. "I think they thought they were going to be staying at the Ritz," he said.

Besse agreed that the first few days had been chaotic, but "cops are used to going to a situation that's in chaos and controlling it".