OVER the past two weeks, the Athens Olympics have become a backdrop to our lives. They have been a constant presence in our living rooms, the lure of non-stop live sport simply too much for many to resist (and while football is distinctly a blokes’ sport, the Olympics has events to satisfy the whole family). Our news bulletins and newspapers have been dominated by the triumphs and the human tragedies, our offices have hosted heated discussions about the previous evening’s events.
As the Games come to a close tonight, this is the mark of the success of Athens 2004. What are we talking about? We’re talking about the sport, the tales of human endeavour, of triumph against adversity, of desperate disappointment. Take the weight lifting – hardly the most gripping of spectator sports in normal circumstances: Greece brought a dream team capped with medals from Sydney and Atlanta, but came away with only one bronze. Yet amid the disappointment, what more enduring image was there than that of triple gold medallist Pyrros Dimas battling against injury to compete at his home Games and receiving an emotional standing ovation as, clad with his victor’s olive wreath, he collected the bronze medal?
Yes, we have spoken a lot about Costas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou and the unbelievable shenanigans surrounding their missed doping test on the eve of the games (and the booing at the start of the 200 metres final was not the edifying moment of the Games). For a few days, the scandal threatened to overshadow the Olympics, but even Kenteris and Thanou have been relegated to secondary importance as the host nation produced a raft of new heroes to supplant them – the crowd was our doping, quipped Greece’s first fold medallists in the synchronised diving event. In fact, for its size, Greece has performed remarkably well, with almost as many gold medals as Great Britain, a country almost six times its size.
And imagine if Kenteris had lit the Olympic flame at the opening ceremony, had performed, won the 200 metres and then failed a doping test and been stripped of his medal, Ben Johnson style. Thank God we did not reach that scenario. As Games spokesman Michael Zacharatos said: “The more athletes that are caught cheating in our Games the cleaner athletics we will have.” In fact, the IOC has sought to put the drug scandals in perspective: 10,500 athletes are participating in the games and there have only been a handful of positive doping tests – a similar tally to Sydney when a 25 per cent rise in testing since the last games had in fact expected to yield more positive cases in Athens.
But let us move on from the drugs: doping is now an integral part of modern sport, and a spate of positive tests hardly comes as a surprise, even if the Kenteris-Thanou farce cast a pall over the opening of the Games. Remember those predictions of chaos that we were being fed almost from the day Athens was awarded the Games? There was going to be transport gridlock, the security was going to be a bad joke, the venues would be unfinished, patched together at the last moment and would come apart at the seams as the Games took place.
The British press in particular just loved it. How many stories they ran about Greek chaos, how many reporters deliberately tried to breach security measures and trumpeted their success on the front pages? Over the past two weeks they have gone mercifully quiet. We have not heard a single story about athletes stuck in Athenian traffic (the special Olympic lanes appear to have worked remarkably well), no stories of mayhem at the Olympic village, no complaints about any of the facilities, and, until yesterday, mercifully no security lapses. Even the disappointing sight of empty seats at the initial events made way for packed, enthusiastic stadia in the second week.
As the curtain comes down on the Athens games tonight, we can honestly congratulate Greece for defying the critics, for producing a Games worthy of their historic homecoming. It was a challenge. Greece does not have a reputation for efficiency and organisation – clichés that, combined with the poor start to the preparations, were grist to the mill for the doomsayers.
But the country rose to the challenge of putting on its best performance on the biggest global stage. In so doing, it has succeeded in banishing many of those clichés, in setting a new image of a confident, modern Greece very different from the shambles of its more recent history. Greece had already changed – its new political maturity in the region is testament to that, as is the new confidence and respect that it commands within the European Union. What it has done through the Games is to banish its own demons and to redefine itself in the eyes of the world.
