I didn’t hesitate to ask favors of those who weren’t my natural allies. I went to the unions and pleaded for their cooperation, even if they were within their rights to strike or take job actions. “I understand it’s your right,” I would tell them, “but it’s not the right time.” Even the anarchists backed off during the Olympics.
I was asking for cooperation and understanding for the common cause, for a shared goal. And I usually wound up getting it because most people respected the fact that I came to them personally to solicit their cooperation.
Even when it was clear we were steadily accelerating our progress, various media stayed on their brutal course. I have a collection of cartoons in which I was cast—often with an unflattering rendering—as Superwoman, as Cleopatra, as Lara Croft, as Iron Lady, as Phantom Lady. There was one journalist on a daily (signing as Pandora) whose comments were especially acidic, branding me “Fuehrerin” for my managerial approach and my disputes with the government. The cartoons accompanying those comments would depict me as a queen or an empress on my throne. When I met with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the German Chancellery prior to the Games, I sent Pandora a photo of the meeting with a note on the back saying, “Dear Pandora, a souvenir of the Fuehrerin’s visit to the real chancellery.” Pandora took it with good humor.
Whoever I was supposed to be, the characterization remained essentially the same: I was the Olympic bitch—indeed, the Superbitch, a tough and wealthy woman who dictated how everything should be done. Those others reluctantly admitted, however, that I was the doer. One newspaper actually wrote a front-page editorial urging the public prosecutor to indict me and send me to jail, though it didn’t bother to specify any charges. Conveniently unwritten was the story about how I had refused the newspaper’s owner when he came to my office—all smiles and bearing flowers—and asked me to include one of his large parcels of land in our Olympic development plans. This was the old way of doing business in Greece: using relationships to secure deals that, if not completely corrupt, were untoward and more in one individual’s interest than in the national interest. And I wasn’t having it. (In the end, I stopped looking at the newspapers, though I had our press office provide me with a digest of what was being written.)
If I was a “bitch” at times—and I was—it was because I had no choice. I had to get things done with a dispatch that was not customary in our country. There were no precedents for what I was asking of our people. I wanted to create hope, I wanted to get things done, but I first had to create a fear of failure. I had to make everyone—the government, the organizing committee, and the public—afraid that, if they did not heed my urgent pleas, Greece would fail and be the laughingstock of the world.
But personal attacks pained me a lot. I was giving my all to Greece in order to pull off an impossible dream yet I was being pilloried for it. The IOC was breathing down my neck, demanding that I get things moving, yet I was deadlocked with some government officials driven by self-aggrandizement and a need to exercise power for power’s sake.
Early in my tenure, especially, I often sat in my office late at night crying, cloaked in the very despair that I was preaching against publicly. Back then, waiting for the government breakthrough that would just give us a fighting chance seemed about as promising as waiting for Godot. If there were one person I could rely upon for his strength, it was the man I had dubbed “the General.” COO Marton Simitsek is a tough-minded pragmatist, and there were many nights when he would come into my office and gently say, “President, are we going home?”
I recall one night, though, after another crisis with the government, when he came to my office unusually early.
“President, what are we doing here?” he said. “Maybe we should all just go home.”
He was not talking about going home for the night, but home for good. And on many nights I did consider that option.
What kept me going, however, were the hope, the excitement, the expectation, and the belief I could see on the faces of all the people in Greece.
THE OPENING CEREMONY FOR THE 2004 ATHENS SUMMER GAMES would begin with a heartbeat. That is, a beat rendered by two drummers, one in the Olympic Stadium and one almost two hundred miles to the west in ancient Olympia, which symbolized our commitment to conduct our Games on a human scale. Four years earlier, that’s where I began too. I had to convince Greece that our effort was alive, that despite all evidence to the contrary our heart was still beating and our dream was still possible. Only if Greece believed in that message could we fulfill our destiny.
Sometimes belief can start with a single person, just one person who refuses to take “no” for an answer. I don’t believe in the impossible. I have always believed that if you take your passion and transform it into the energy and effort that are required to do whatever is necessary, then nothing is impossible. Sometimes I would overhear one of my staff say, “Please, God, make it happen.” I would get furious. “Stop that b.s.! It’s up to us to do whatever is necessary to make it happen. Afterward, if you still want to pray to your God or your Buddha or whomever, well then that’s okay.”
It is easier to say all this now when we’re looking back on our spectacular success as hosts than it was to embrace that belief in the beginning. I can’t tell you the number of heartbreaks I suffered along the way, particularly in the early days. To check on our progress I would visit a construction site where there were specific timelines that we had agreed to meet (and that the IOC officials would be checking up on quite soon) and find that the digging hadn’t even begun. Why? Well, the contractor said he hadn’t been paid. Why? Well, the government said it didn’t have the money. Why? Well, the government Minister claimed that the money was supposed to have come from the European Union. And so it went. Greece’s newest Olympic sport: passing the buck around and around and around again.
I remember in particular one early visit from IOC officials. Because there were so many construction sites, they didn’t have time to visit them all. So instead we showed them a videotape of bulldozers working at the various sites. One of the IOC guys wisecracked, “How long did it take you to move those bulldozers from one hill to another?” I was infuriated by his mockery. Later I told my staff, “Next time we will ask the contractors to use different-colored bulldozers so that these jerks can’t make jokes at our expense.”
We have an old proverb in Greece that goes like this: “There is no wedding without tears; there is no funeral without laughs.”
I have already talked about my ample tears, but there was plenty of laughter too. Jokes, outrageous jokes, were often the only way to handle the huge burdens and continual disappointments without more tears than were already falling. There was no shortage of gallows humor. We just preferred our own jokes to the IOC’s.
But through the laughter and through the tears, I was effecting a major change in ATHOC’s culture. Greeks have a habit of procrastinating. And they ultimately always tend to reach the same conclusion: “It cannot be done …” or “Yes, but …” I succeeded in eliminating the “cannot” and “but” from the process. I bore the responsibility so people could choose to do it my way or they could leave. I built up a “can-do” organization. We required that the government do its job and allow us to do our job. The English saying is, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” I like that approach. Once the Prime Minister pushed through new rules that expedited procedures and armed me with new powers, we at least felt that a lot of obstacles had “gotten out of the way” and we had a fighting chance. But it never ceased to be a fight.
I remember a rare night in Athens in 2001 when I had managed to get home in time to have dinner with my family. Instead, I wound up in a screaming fight on the phone with one government Minister who, typically, had failed to deliver what he had promised when he had promised it. After I slammed down the phone in a rage, Panagiotis, who wasn’t yet twelve years old, suggested it might help me if I took an anger-management course. I couldn’t help but laugh. “You know, Pan,” I s
aid, “I’m afraid this is how it’s going to be.”
“But, Mom,” he said, “it’s probably bad for your health.” Out of the mouths of babes!
Did I make mistakes along the way? Many. Nobody in the world is trained to do the job I was asked to do. (And believe me, there’s a reason that nobody who has ever done it signs on to do it a second time.) A lot of case studies get written after the fact, but there is no university with a graduate program in organizing the Olympics. It is such a vast terrain, requiring elements of an MBA and a law degree as well as studies in government administration, economics, business strategy, organizational behavior, engineering, human-resources management, communications, archaeology, environment, psychology, and a host of other subspecialties.
Mitt Romney has deemed it such a sufficiently large challenge that his successfully running the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics was one of the reasons he believed he would have been an effective President of the United States. (Those Games, by the way, were only one-tenth the size of the Summer Games we hosted in Athens.)
Nobody before had organized Olympic Games of the magnitude of the ones in Athens, let alone on a reduced timetable in a unified Europe whose legislation required procedures and tenders for every single project. It’s less a job than an odyssey in which you are forced to confront a multitude of obstacles, regulatory constraints, and interfering parties—from the Greek bureaucrats to the IOC, from historical protection agencies and archaeologists to the European Union, from environmentalists to the military and defense ministries and agencies from around the world.
Who could guide you through this maze? I had my sources. I have always kept two books by my bedside and regard them as the closest thing to a textbook when it comes to managing and, ultimately, conquering challenges. They are The Art of War by Sun Tzu and The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. Perhaps it seems strange that a book written by a Chinese general more than two millennia ago and a political treatise from the chaotic sixteenth century in Italy could be so relevant to a woman in the twenty-first century. I am also aware that some people regard these books as rather sinister. But I view them as straightforward treatises on strategic planning, critical lessons on how to attain your goals and to protect yourself from the intrigues of others.
Most everybody is familiar with Sun Tzu’s pithy pronouncement “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” The first part is easy and may seem obvious. However, many find the second part to be counterintuitive. Left to my own instincts, I would have kept Lambis Nikolaou, the Greek IOC member and inveterate troublemaker, as far from me as possible. But booting him out would have created a flashpoint for problems with the government and even my key ally, the IOC brass. Instead—to the amazement of Prime Minister Simitis—I named Nikolaou Vice President of the organizing committee. As such, he was nominally in charge of ATHOC whenever I was off duty, which never happened.
Machiavelli resonated with me too. How could I not recognize the wisdom in his admonition that “hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil”? And as I fought back and put ATHOC on the path to success, I certainly embraced his notion that “it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”
Some people see these books as particularly at odds with a feminist philosophy. Although both men authored their books at a time when men held all the power, I see no underlying gender bias. I don’t subscribe to the notion that women manage or should manage in a gentler, more nurturing fashion than men do. Tell that to Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir. I am a feminist to the extent that I believe women should be free to pursue their ambitions just as men are. Obviously, I did just that in my law and political careers. And when I ran for Parliament, creating the brochure that highlighted all the women who had served in Parliament, I even celebrated that right.
Truthfully, I tend to be biased in favor of women. I believe that women are as talented as men are and, quite often, stronger. Because women give birth, they know both how to give life and how to endure pain. And it was the latter—enduring pain and persevering—that, unhappily, was one of the most critical requirements in our Olympic endeavors. If I was sometimes harder on the women than on the men, it was because I had such high expectations for them.
As President of ATHOC, I hired a tremendous number of women for key positions, the largest number ever for an Olympic organizing committee. I never subscribed to the belief that I was obligated to hire a certain arbitrary percentage of women. I hired people for one reason and one reason only: because they were right for the job. At times I also find myself at odds with feminist dogma because I tend not to be politically correct. I am more pragmatist than doctrinaire in anything and everything I do. I believe that a woman can be most effective by using all her gifts—her strength, her intelligence, her beauty, her charm, and her feminine intuition. Believe me, I used all the weapons at my disposal—except one!—including crying and flattery to manipulate men into doing what was required. At critical points during our Olympic campaign, I wooed and won, as allies, men with whom I would never have deigned to have a cup of coffee otherwise. I would visit their offices and tell them: “You are the only one in Greece who can do this. Your country will owe you an extraordinary debt of gratitude.” I provided a photo-op during these visits that would definitely be published or broadcast. Men are easy to manipulate because they are especially vulnerable to flattery and ego stroking.
On the other hand, I also cracked down on young women in my office who wore miniskirts and other casual and, at times, provocative clothing. I hadn’t forgotten that I once lived in miniskirts. And I wasn’t overreacting to any distraction these women might create in the office. These women were supposed to be part of a team that projected professionalism and the highest standards to all those—and there were many—who came through our doors. And to our visitors, casual could equate to sloppy and unprofessional (except on casual Fridays, if we didn’t have an official meeting).
Later, with the Games less than a year away, I dared to suggest to women employees that it was an unsuitable time for them to get pregnant. This was not an issue of women’s rights. It was a statement of fact, or at least of mission. We weren’t an ongoing enterprise that—after the Games were over—could welcome back a woman after maternity leave. We had a short window in which we were required to perform and we needed everyone doing their all. We had no excess capacity, no fat, in our organization. If a single critical employee couldn’t fulfill his or her responsibilities it might make it impossible for ATHOC to fulfill ours. So while we sent flowers and congratulations to women who had babies right around Games time, we replaced them early on, at the moment we knew they would be unavailable to us.
I will confess to another unfashionable habit. I am a control freak. I do not believe that a watched pot never boils. In fact, I am inclined to believe just the opposite: namely, that if employees believe their work is being scrutinized closely they perform at a higher level. I also held secrets closely. With rare exceptions, I told people only what they needed to know to perform their job or task, not the big picture. Our margin for error was razor thin and knowledge is indeed power. In the cutthroat world in which I was operating, knowing everything would have made it too easy for people with private agendas or loose tongues to subvert our plans.
While the grand scheme, the macro-picture, was my province, I also worked incredibly long hours—often into the wee hours of the night—on the micro-picture, tracking developments on every front. Nothing was too minor for my consideration, from questions about the mascots to the choice of colors for the volunteers’ uniforms. I thoroughly enjoyed every second of it. Dealing with the micro-issues gave me great pleasure, balance, and peace of mind when I knew I also had to deal with the macro-issues. Eventually, every operational site in our Games plan would reflect my obsessive attention to detail, each resembling a war room with color-coded charts and organizational grids that ranked the relative importance of all the problems we might encounter and who had the responsi
bility to deal with each. For every possible crisis, we had a plan to handle it, as well as a plan B and sometimes a plan C too.
With me pushing and prodding, macro- and micromanaging, we began to make steady progress. It was not exactly a linear progression. We were dealing with so many diverse projects, constituencies, and agencies at the same time that we could be making progress on one front while simultaneously hitting a dead end on another. Often it was two steps forward, one step back and another step sideways. We had to be prepared to be blindsided. Like when we were digging the new subway lines and stumbled upon relics from Neolithic times. Or when we were about to dredge the rowing venue and our work was called to a halt because European authorities deemed the spot a protected natural habitat. The site was actually filled with dirt and garbage and all the birds had fled long beforehand. We toured it with the Greek Minister of Public Works, Vasso Papandreou (a tough and very able politician), and the EU Environmental Commissioner, Margot Wallström, to show her how our project would protect and enhance the natural fauna and flora in the entire area. Indeed, when we were finished, the water was once again clean and the birds duly returned.
Another—the most heartbreaking—blow to our efforts was, of course, the attacks of 9/11 in the United States. That day I was sitting in my office and, as always, had the TV on without sound. A meeting was in progress when I saw the pictures of the planes and the buildings and the smoke. I yelled to Lena to turn up the sound, and we experienced the same horror as all civilized people around the world did. It may have been the only time in our long and difficult partnership that I actually felt sorry for the Greek government. I knew what was in store for it. Enormous pressure would be brought to bear on Greece regarding security measures, and the price of security would inevitably scale to unimagined heights.
My Greek Drama: Life, Love, and One Woman's Olympic Effort to Bring Glory to Her Country Page 22
