My Greek Drama: Life, Love, and One Woman's Olympic Effort to Bring Glory to Her Country

by Gianna Angelopoulos

  The first order of business remained getting our own house in order. Before we could sell the world on Athens 2004, our team had to understand that 1997 wasn’t going to be a replay of the Centennial Games debacle. Our new “bid concept” memo opened with what was essentially an epitaph for the previous effort: “We realized back in 1990 that our desire and our heritage alone could not guarantee our election to host the Games. In 1990 we thought the Olympic movement owed us the Centennial Games. That was not the case.” While our Olympic history and heritage remained important, we recognized that it would only be a footnote in our campaign. If Athens intended to win the 2004 Summer Games, it would have to triumph in the present and on merit.

  When I was named President of the bid committee, Rome was the prohibitive favorite for 2004, and its bid campaign already had 150 employees. Athens’s campaign had a handful of employees and was being overrun by a typical cast of Greek power brokers—self-promoters, back-stabbers, and do-nothings—who hoped to profit from the association and were prepared solely to bask in the reflected glory should a miraculous outcome occur. All wanted to keep a hand in the process, oblivious to the fact that their interests didn’t necessarily coincide with mine, those of the campaign, or even those of one another. I was also saddled with the two Greek members of the IOC, neither of whom was happy to have me on board. The most problematic was Lambis Nikolaou, an inveterate gossip who was always trying to stir up trouble. The other was Nikos Filaretos, who would wear a Stockholm 2004 pin on his jacket lapel during the final meeting of the IOC to decide the host city for the 2004 Summer Games. With allies like that, who needed enemies?

  I never expected or even wanted these people to be my friends. I just hoped they’d give me the freedom to do the job for which the Prime Minister had chosen me. Some reliable veterans of Greek politics warned me that I had been misled about the job. “They brought you here to be the scapegoat if Greece loses,” insisted Antonis Samaras, who had been Foreign Minister under Constantinos Mitsotakis before breaking with New Democracy to form a new conservative party. (He would later return to the fold and lead New Democracy in the 2012 elections, becoming Prime Minister of a coalition government.)

  Fortunately, I was able to put together an incredible team.

  Theodore had no official standing with the committee, but he made good on his promise of complete support, becoming, in effect, my consigliere. His assistance proved invaluable to me as well as a stroke of good fortune for Athens. As an international businessman, Theodore wasn’t constrained by the provincial thinking that was endemic in Greece. Moreover, he had a gift for cutting through all the political b.s. While the Greek power players persisted in their maneuvering in the wake of my appointment, Theodore suggested that my first move should be to get out of Greece. “You won’t learn how to do this from Greeks,” he said. “To find a strategy, we need to go to where the pros are.” The pros he had in mind were in Lausanne, where the IOC was headquartered; they knew from long experience what a successful bid campaign required.

  Theodore immediately contacted ex-King Constantine to seek his help in setting up a meeting with IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch. Though they were not close friends, Theodore and Constantine had attended the same boarding school, Anavryta Classical Lyceum in Athens, a school founded on the principles of German educator George Hahn and modeled on his most famous schools: Schule Schloss Salem in Germany and Gordonstoun in Scotland. Despite having been in exile for almost three decades, Constantine had remained a controversial figure in Greece, a convenient symbol for the Socialists to deplore whenever it served their agenda. Permitting him any role in our effort risked controversy at home, but we desperately needed a quick leg up in our campaign. As a highly respected figure in the Olympic movement—an Olympic gold medalist in sailing at the Rome 1960 Summer Games and an honorary member of the IOC—Constantine was positioned to accelerate our access to key IOC officials.

  In no time we were sitting down in Lausanne with Samaranch, the man who had transformed the Olympics from a prestigious athletic competition into an international economic juggernaut. He wasn’t one to waste time on a lot of flowery rhetoric. In clear and concise terms, the IOC President laid out a framework for how we should proceed with the business of our bid. Theodore, more internationally oriented than I was, grasped the implications immediately. He understood that we couldn’t be constrained by our country’s provincial instincts. We had to hire advisers who had either worked in the IOC or with the IOC and who knew its voters and its processes and how to wage an Olympic campaign. We needed top marketing pros who spoke all three of the official languages—English, French, and the bureaucratese of the IOC—that the process demanded. Though it pained me, I would even tell my trusted associate Lefteris Kousoulis, who had been at my side since my first Athens city council campaign, that unless he could learn English very quickly or was willing to pay for a simultaneous interpreter, he wouldn’t be able to play a key role on my team.

  All the requirements pointed to hiring outsiders—Americans, Brits, and Swiss—and we needed to get them on board yesterday if not sooner. I hired a number of consultants who came highly recommended. When some didn’t work out, I connected with George Stephanopoulos—a friend in the United States whom I had known through his political work with President Clinton. George was the perfect choice. A Greek-American who came from a traditional family (his father is a Greek Orthodox priest), he is a thoroughly modern thinker and a master strategist. Lefteris, whose father was also a Greek Orthodox priest, had come up with the concept “Athens in Motion,” and George ran with it, casting our campaign firmly in the present and the future rather than in our gloried past.

  Our Olympic legacy would be the physical and emotional transformation of Athens into a modern European capital poised to take on the new millennium. For us, the Olympics were no longer a story of Olympia and the temple of Zeus or the legend of a soldier who ran from Marathon to Athens to bring news of the Greek victory over the Persians. Rather, it was a tale of the new airport, the new trains, the new trams, the new roads, and the new athletic facilities. George proposed that we hire a trio of American media and communications consultants—Mark Steitz, David Dreyer, and Robin Schepper—as point persons for our international campaign. All three of these Clinton-Gore campaign veterans embraced our cause fully and proved to be invaluable teammates.

  Before I left Switzerland, Samaranch reminded me of the Greeks’ propensity to blame others for their misfortunes. “There are no foreign enemies out there,” he said. “You Greeks are your own worst enemy.” So while I returned to Greece confident that I was on the right path, I wasn’t surprised to find that others in powerful positions weren’t quite as sanguine about my first efforts. They were furious that I hadn’t first presented my ideas to the committee for approval, a process that almost certainly would have ensured that nothing got done, or, if it did, that it would have been done far too late.

  Here’s an example—only other Greeks won’t be shocked—of the kind of obstacles I confronted at home. We faced a critical mid-August deadline to produce a detailed bid file in which we detailed our plans and sundry projects for the Summer Games. Besides Athens and Rome, eight other cities were organizing bids: Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Cape Town, Seville, Lille, and St. Petersburg. At that point, Athens wasn’t even guaranteed inclusion among the five cities invited to Lausanne for the final IOC vote.

  Given that we were already behind schedule, producing a first-rate bid file in just a few months should have been the most daunting of our challenges. But we found experts who somehow managed to render our complex ideas into detailed plans with extraordinary dispatch. The hard part turned out to be securing the deposit that each city was required to submit to the IOC along with the bid file. The ante was only $100,000, petty cash by the standards of our Olympic endeavor. But when I sought the money, nobody in the government—not the Finance Minister, not the Sports Minister, not any Minister—could find a
ny money in their budget for our campaign or was willing to cut us a check! I had been on the job for less than four months and already time was running out on our Olympic dream. How was I going to explain this preposterous failure? “We could afford an Olympics, but not the filing fee.” Ultimately, an exasperated Theodore wired the IOC $100,000 from his Swiss bank account to keep our bid alive. It would not be the last time that Theodore and I bailed out Greece by bankrolling its Olympic campaign.

  And that was pretty much how it proceeded, with our experts doing their jobs diligently while I begged and scraped for the money necessary to do mine. Because I had no faith in the government effort, I was a total pain in the ass. I double- and triple-checked for accuracy every detail of every document provided to us. And I rode the bureaucrats mercilessly to get the work done on time. The Greeks don’t have a word that expresses it quite as well as the Spanish word mañana, but that has long been the operating philosophy in Greece. “Okay, we’ll do it tomorrow.”

  And when tomorrow came, there would be endless more tomorrows. Throughout the entire campaign, we would be slowed and stymied by the repeated failures of government Ministers and their bureaucracies to deliver on their commitments to us. They seemed perfectly willing to let the bid campaign fail and then blame it on the committee.

  For the entire sixteen months, I just kept telling myself: “Find a way. Be bold. Make decisions yourself and be prepared to fight for them.” It was a never-ending war. When I started the job, there hadn’t yet been offices set aside for the committee. I was forced to work out of the first floor at the Grand Bretagne Hotel in downtown Athens, which I had booked and paid for myself. It was an impossible situation and I informed Prime Minister Simitis of the problem. He assured me one of his Ministers would take care of it.

  Knowing that that meant nothing would be done, I went out on my own and found space at Zappeion, a mid-nineteenth-century building with significant Olympic connections. It was the first building constructed in Greece specifically with the revival of the Olympics in mind and, at the inaugural modern games in 1896, served as the first Olympic village. The fencing competition was also held in its halls. Surprisingly, for all its beauty and historic ties to the Olympics, Zappeion boasted a modern downtown location that abutted forty acres of splendor that used to be the Palace Gardens. In the near future, IOC delegates would be paraded through Zappeion and few were immune to its charms.

  Eventually I came to believe that the Prime Minister, at least in his heart, supported my effort. But his low-key style was a problem for me. While he would tell his Ministers to give me whatever I needed, he was unwilling to ruffle any feathers when they disregarded his instructions. His top advisers viewed me as an outsider and, worse, a member of the opposition. I recall one visit to Simitis’s office to plead for the funding for Zappeion that he had already authorized. I watched him pick up the phone and call his economic adviser Nikos Christodoulakis to inquire about the delay. I watched Simitis smile and nod his head. When he hung up, he assured me, “Nikos will take care of it.”

  “Nikos” had no such intention. I was on friendly terms with a journalist who happened to be sitting with Christodoulakis when he received that call. Afterward, while Simitis was smiling and nodding and giving me polite assurances, his economic adviser was venting his displeasure. “I mean this wealthy bitch comes here playing games as if we will really win the [Olympic] Games,” he told the journalist. “She comes from the opposition—the people who actually have all the money—and she wants me to spend our money so she can fly around on her private jet, wear her jewels, and have drinks with all these important people. And then in the end, we will lose as well.” When the journalist asked about his intentions, Christodoulakis replied, “The Prime Minister will forget and she’ll have to go back to him and complain again.”

  Simitis may not have forgotten, but I’m not sure that he ever believed—until the final weeks—that Greece could win. So he didn’t know how much actual capital—both real and political—he should invest in what ultimately could be a losing fight. I was stuck in this ridiculous, even surreal pattern. I would request money, the Prime Minister would assure me it would be forthcoming from a Minister, and the Minister would fail to deliver. I remember asking Simitis on one occasion: “Why don’t you just sack him? Or better yet, throw him out the window.” Regrettably, I would find myself repeatedly making that same suggestion throughout all the years the Prime Minister and I worked together on the Summer Games. Hearing it then for the first time, Simitis shrugged sort of sheepishly and said, “But Mrs. Angelopoulos, these are my people.”

  If Athens was to be a viable contender, I simply couldn’t wait for the government to get things done. It was Theodore who would say, “Just pay it,” or “Hire them.” So we were paying rent on our headquarters as well as salaries and consultant fees out of our own pockets. Perhaps that’s what the government was counting on, though the Prime Minister always seemed embarrassed and would assure me, “You know, Mrs. Angelopoulos, that we will pay you back.” That never happened. After the campaign was over, my final financial report revealed that Theodore and I had spent five billion drachmas, or about $15 million, of our own money on the campaign.

  And that didn’t even count the use of our private jet, which we flew whenever time was critical, which was pretty much all of the time. “If we use our jet, we will get places before the Italians do,” Theodore would say. At the same time I delivered the final financial report to the auditors, Theodore and I wrote a letter to the Simitis government forgiving its entire debt to us. “We did it for our country,” the letter said. And that was the absolute truth.

  When I returned to Athens after my first trip to Lausanne, I briefed the Prime Minister thoroughly, including details of the ex-King’s assistance, which to me carried no political connotation whatsoever. I could see he was distressed by Constantine’s involvement, which flew in the face of a Socialist orthodoxy that offered no room for the ex-King in the affairs of Greece. I assured Simitis that while I was well aware of his government’s policy regarding royals, Athens, as an underdog off to a late start, needed to exploit its few advantages. Sometimes, I told him, you have to work with the devil if the devil is on your side. Another appropriate maxim was that politics makes for strange bedfellows, which was pretty obvious given that I was sitting there with the Prime Minister in the first place. “I understand,” was all Simitis said. He clearly did not relish confrontations.

  The irate call came instead from Sports Minister Fouras. “Who are you to expose our government and Prime Minister to political embarrassment?” he screamed. “Because you have been consorting with the ex-King, you no longer have my confidence.”

  “I don’t give a damn about your confidence,” I told him. “Who do you think you are that I depend on your confidence?”

  “I am the Minister,” he bristled.

  “That’s right,” I said, “and I am the person who is here to do your job, and you are here to assist me. So assist me or go to hell!” It would be that way between the two of us right up until the moment we were all jumping in the air and hugging to celebrate our victory.

  From the start, the bid committee was a disaster. All of the members had their own power base that operated independently. Each member hoped to impose his own ideas. The committee’s only common interest was in obstructing any steps I took to propel our stalled bid forward. One by one they began to resign in protest over my leadership, a power play orchestrated by the Mayor in hopes of regaining control of the process. Eventually eight of them, or two-thirds of the bid committee, quit. All were prominent members of Greek society.

  The committee members’ actions proved to be a miscalculation, however. Twice I offered the Prime Minister my resignation. I truly was ready to return to London, where I had the comfort of a wonderful family and a lovely home. In Athens I was often alone and working late hours. A fight loomed every step of the way. The sacrifices asked of me seemed too many, the challenge too da
unting. My charge was all but impossible in the face of the relentless obstructionism from the status quo.

  But Prime Minister Simitis ignored my offers and set about convincing me that, however cautious he might be by nature, he was truly on my side. “I’ll create a new committee,” he promised. “Please,” I beseeched him, “can it have just three members?” Simitis understood the problems I faced. Another large and recalcitrant committee might cripple our effort. “No, not three. But we can hold it to five members.” He also granted me significant executive powers, enabling me to make certain decisions single-handedly. And this time, instead of appointing representatives from all the powerful and vested interests, he chose smart, productive people, including Lucas Papademos, the respected economist and central banker. (In November 2011, he would be appointed Prime Minister, entrusted with the complex negotiations to prevent Greece from defaulting on its debt.) We had started late and wasted precious time on internecine squabbling. But that was beginning to change. For the first time, we—the Prime Minister, the committee, and me—appeared to be on the same page and working together toward the same goal.

  The members of the new bid committee were Lucas Papademos, Kostas Liaskas, Yiannis Sgouros, Andreas Potamianos, and me.

  The key members of my staff were Marton Simitsek, whom I nicknamed “the General” and whose leadership skills were later rewarded when I named him COO of the Athens Olympic Organizing Committee (ATHOC); Spyros Capralos, a former Greek Olympian in water polo who would also have a post on the ATHOC steering committee; Dionyssis Gangas, an Athens attorney; and Lena Zachopoulou. (You’ll remember that she was with me at the very beginning of my political career, when I ran for the Athens city council.)