Kipchoge ‘Kip’ Keino of Kenya, who won the 1,500-meter race in the 1968 Olympics, holds up the Olympic Flame during a ceremony in the Peloponnesian town of Argos yesterday. The flame will be brought to Athens’s Panathenaic Stadium at 7.50 p.m. by Katerina Thanou, who won the silver medal in the women’s 100-meter sprint in Sydney.

Six days after the lighting ceremony in Ancient Olympia, the Olympic Flame is due to arrive in Athens this evening under intense security measures.

The ceremony for the arrival of the flame will take place at 6.45 p.m. at the Panathenaic Stadium in the city center, where the first modern Olympics were held in 1896.

Some 1,500 policemen will be on duty, while traffic will be banned from the area shortly before the ceremony, parking will not be allowed in surrounding streets from 6 a.m. and the National Gardens as well as the Zappeion Gardens — which lie across the road from the marble stadium — will be off bounds to the public from 4 to 8 p.m.

Access to the free event will be allowed between 4.30 and 7 p.m., while the only open approaches will be from Ardittou, Vassileos Constantinou and Vassilissis Olgas streets. All members of the public entering the stadium will have to undergo rigorous checks, in which metal detectors will be used. Yesterday, police called on people planning to attend the ceremony not to take bags or metal objects with them.