Meanwhile, Greece was doing its job. The West was obsessed with the threat from Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists. Greek security forces—thanks mainly to the efforts of Minister for Public Order Michalis Chrisochoidis and Public Prosecutor Yiannis Diotis—arrested the members of Revolutionary Organization 17 November, the terrorist group that had conducted more than a hundred attacks and assassinated twenty-three people in Greece since 1975—among them, as I mentioned previously, my husband’s uncle and mentor, Dimitris Angelopoulos.
There would be bumps elsewhere too. One of the most distressing came on the water during the World Rowing Junior Championships held in early August 2003. It was the first of a succession of major test events, competitions designed to ensure that our new Olympic sports venues, along with the ATHOC staff, were up and running—and running efficiently. The International Rowing Federation had chosen the dates, apparently oblivious to the fact that they coincided with a peak period for the turbulent, high Meltemi winds that come out of the Balkans and sweep across Greek waters. These winds created violent conditions that wound up flipping and swamping many of the boats.
I received a call from an annoyed Prime Minister Simitis asking me what had happened. My reply was: “We tried too hard to be the gracious and accommodating hosts and allowed the International Rowing Federation to plan a competition despite the early August winds. On the bright side, Mr. Prime Minister, this event gave us a valuable lesson: ‘Don’t give in to all demands.’ And I assure you that our actual Olympic rowing competition will take place in late August.”
After the rowing incident, we knew we couldn’t let any sports federation cajole or bully us at the expense of safety.
So I delivered the message loud and clear: I don’t like surprises unless I have planned them.
Eventually there came a point when nobody inside or outside the Olympic movement could deny the momentum we had achieved. Nobody could accuse us of moving bulldozers from site to site because we were building everywhere, creating visible symbols of our progress toward the Games. And by late 2003, every project was essentially on schedule and would be completed on time as long as we maintained our breakneck pace without major delays or disasters. We fortunately averted those, but there were enough bumps in the road to ensure that we never became overconfident.
PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK if there was one moment when I knew with absolute certainty that we would succeed. There was no one moment, but many. Nevertheless, nothing did more to convince me that we were making extraordinary headway and that Greece would ultimately rise to the occasion than our success in recruiting volunteers.
You have to understand that until these Olympics, Greece had no real history or culture of volunteerism. So it wasn’t as simple as spreading the word that we were taking applications. We had to “sell” our mission to the Greek people. To do that, ATHOC launched a national advertising campaign promoting Olympic volunteerism. Years earlier at one of our presentations about volunteerism, I came up with the impromptu slogan “I will also be there!” My communications staff picked it up back then and that became our slogan for all our volunteer campaigns.
I personally traveled all around the country preaching the message of a new kind of patriotism, and frankly, I was astounded by the positive response everywhere I went. I remember some people discouraging me from visiting Muslim communities in northern Greece, insisting that it would be a waste of time and that the reception to a female leader might be hostile. I disregarded that advice and have vivid memories of people lining the streets to welcome me and of Muslim women showering me with carnations from their balconies.
I was in a rather unique position to preach about this commitment, of course, since I was, after all, the Athens 2004’s first volunteer. I had taken the job as President of the organizing committee to be of service to my country without accepting a salary.
And, just as Theodore and I did during the bid campaign, we wound up paying not only my own expenses but also many ATHOC expenses, such as research and hiring consultants in Greece and abroad, as well as underwriting staff travel.
The Greek people wound up responding to our entreaty for volunteers in numbers beyond our wildest dreams. We shattered all previous Olympic records for volunteer applications. We had to stop accepting them after we received more than 165,000 applications, about four times the number we would require. Two-thirds of the applicants—some 110,000 people—were from Greece, which has a population of only about 10 million, or roughly the same as the Los Angeles metropolitan area. We received applications from 190 countries, many of them from Greeks living abroad or people of Greek heritage. I always feel a special bond with these volunteers, who performed heroically—the shining, smiling, modern face of Greece—during the Olympics and the Paralympics. Throughout the Games, I proudly wore the exact same uniform—no superior cut of cloth this time—worn by every one of our 45,000 Olympic and 15,000 Paralympic volunteers. Years later, people still come up to me and tell me what a thrill it was to volunteer for the Games.
In my heart, I had always believed that the Greek people would rise to the occasion when asked to volunteer. I confess, however, that I was less certain about how we would fare with a new kind of “volunteer” initiative that was just as critical to our success. Come Games time, we needed Athenians to radically change their lifestyle—to sacrifice a lifetime’s cherished habits and customs—for the sake of the greater good.
After an inter-ministerial committee meeting, I met privately with Prime Minister Simitis and Minister for Culture and Sports Venizelos and I presented the plan of how the public should be informed of the changes to their daily lives we would be making prior to and during the Olympic Games. These included security and transportation measures; hours when shops and restaurants could be open; more than forty municipalities cleaning the city during the nights (something unprecedented); thousands of supply vans and trucks delivering during the night; smoking restrictions; when and how people should arrive at venues; exclusive use of public transport; and many more important matters.
Venizelos wanted to wait until just before the Games and simply pass a new law that mandated all the changes and prescribed punishments for lawbreakers. I told him and the Prime Minister that his idea was unacceptable. “The Greek people will not accept being told what to do at the last minute.”
He insisted, and in an arrogant and pompous manner, without even glancing at me, he said to Simitis, “My plan is the best.”
So I said to both of them, “If you insist on this approach, I will resign and you can proceed and pass the law at the last minute.”
ATHOC’s plan was to begin a campaign more than a year in advance that would educate the public on how their daily lives would be affected prior to and during the Olympics. Likewise, they would learn what would be required of them and, most critically, why. The campaign focused on test events such as the marathon, cycling races, and the triathlon, all of which required major traffic restrictions. We would use multiple vehicles—media, Internet, public meetings, and face-to-face approaches (in cafés, restaurants, shops) in certain neighborhoods near the Olympic venues—to ensure that we informed as many people as possible. In the spring of 2003, we launched our campaign. We held community forums throughout Athens and conducted more than three hundred meetings with 155 different interest groups: customs officials, banks’ staff, police chiefs, hospital personnel, truck drivers, taxi drivers, street market vendors, hoteliers, pharmacists, immigrants’ associations, groups for special needs people, animal protection groups, forty city authorities, and everybody else in the public and private sectors. In the key neighborhoods near Olympic venues, we even went door-to-door passing out pamphlets that explained what was required of people.
Plus, what was required of the average Athenian, at least by Greek standards, was extraordinary. People couldn’t drive in certain places at certain hours. People couldn’t park their cars in the streets near the venues, which meant many of them would be forced to park their
cars at a considerable distance from their homes. All spectators would have to use public transportation to arrive at the venues, and they would have to abandon the Greek habit of arriving at the last minute. Instead, they would have to arrive hours in advance to clear security.
These changes became so ingrained that during the hours when the otherwise restricted Olympic driving lanes were open to the public, drivers tended to stick to the public lanes, and honked their reproach at those who ventured into the privileged ones.
Taxi drivers didn’t hike their prices for tourists. Even Greek VIPs came to accept that nobody was getting free tickets or prime seats.
On a far grander scale than when we had revamped attitudes at ATHOC, we had to change the mantra of your average Greek from “Yes, but …” to “Yes!” Only then could we begin to change how the world viewed Greeks.
The result of our efforts was a testament to how effective leadership can be when the time is taken to ask and explain rather than simply to issue new and unpopular rules and expect the public to comply with them. Compliance with our new regulations would prove to be extraordinarily high and a critical part of our Olympic success. In fact, Athenians did more than we asked of them. It was a lesson in how to effect change. Once the public was informed about the reasons for the new rules, they accepted them and, indeed, embraced them, becoming partners in the success of the Games. It felt very much like a personal vindication.
The average Greeks, the ones who suffer the systemic abuses by the power brokers, had no problems with me. Indeed, just as when I served them on the city council and in Parliament, I sensed that I had earned both their affection and their respect.
Simitis’s Socialist government could claim neither. By early 2004, the Prime Minister was acutely aware that he was facing an uphill battle in the next election.
I understood how he felt when he came to me with a bizarre and inappropriate proposal (which was actually Venizelos’s idea). ATHOC’s plan to make the torch relay a worldwide event—for the very first time, runners would carry the torch on five continents—had created great international excitement. But the Greek portion of the relay, with all the attendant excitement about the approaching Olympics, wouldn’t begin until after the national election, too late to help Simitis. So the Prime Minister proposed that we create a much earlier Greek relay that would bring a torch from Olympia to the Panathinaiko Stadium, the site of the first modern Games in 1896, just days before voters went to the polls.
As respectfully as I could, I told the Prime Minister that an additional relay would be impossible. I couldn’t turn a sacred Olympic tradition into a political tool for the government—or any political party. I wouldn’t compromise the integrity of the Games. The Olympics belonged to the Greek people, not to the Greek government.
In March 2004, just five months before the Olympic cauldron would be lit during our Opening Ceremony, Simitis and his Socialists lost the elections after eleven years of rule, routed by New Democracy in the parliamentary election.
Though I shared a party affiliation with Kostas Karamanlis, the new Prime Minister, and had known him since my first days in Parliament, I felt more than a twinge of regret for my former dance partner, Costas Simitis. Despite all my struggles with his government, I would never forget that it was Simitis who had defied his own party and given me the immense privilege of first leading the bid committee and, later, organizing the Games. It didn’t seem fair that now, on the cusp of the Olympics, all the glory, all the speeches, and all the photo-ops would go to his opposition. In my official speech at the Olympic Closing Ceremony, I would ignore protocol by publicly thanking the former Prime Minister as well, acknowledging his pivotal role in bringing the Games to Athens.
The change in governments had no real impact on my job. At that point, so late in the game, we were out of crisis mode and on schedule to meet all our obligations. No elected official in his right mind was going to tinker with a successful plan and risk a failure that could be laid at his feet. Shortly after the election, I met with the new Prime Minister in his office to brief him.
I began, “Mr. Prime Minister—”
“Gianna, please,” he interrupted, “call me Kostas.”
“Mr. Prime Minister,” I continued, “you are one lucky man. Now all the hard work is done. We are 97 percent finished and it is just a little nip and tuck. For you, it should be as easy as taking the cream out of the milk. You can be so proud of the Greek people. We will show the world a brand-new country. If you take advantage of this legacy of our hardworking people, you will wind up running a very successful nation and write history.”
I suspect, left to his own devices, he might have taken my excellent advice. But it soon became clear that his advisers were more concerned with who would occupy center stage than with what we had accomplished as a nation. “Why is she the only one we see?” was the refrain in the Prime Minister’s office. “You are the Prime Minister, the one chosen by the Greek people,” his people were telling him, “but she is always there like the messiah.”
All the same, I didn’t worry too much, because Karamanlis was smart enough to understand that they couldn’t take it from there; they couldn’t deliver. But I could. So he shut them up by saying, “Let her finish this.”
As I had assured the new Prime Minister, everything was proceeding smoothly. And soon the Olympics were so close at hand the excitement was palpable. But if Greece needed a harbinger of good things to come, that summer—less than six weeks before the Games—provided an extraordinary one. On July fourth, the Greek national soccer team—a 150-to-1 underdog at tournament’s start—won the European championship for the first time ever. They defeated Portugal on their home turf in Lisbon by a score of one to nothing.
Theodore and I were in Lisbon for the semifinal victory over the Czech Republic. But on the night of the final, we had to attend a family wedding at the Hotel Grand Bretagne in downtown Athens. That night I was also introduced to George Soros and had a conversation with him about Greece’s effort for the Olympics. Throughout the evening, people at the party were streaming in and out of another room to check the score of the game on TV. Theodore had driven the car himself that night because, he complained, he was tired of always being surrounded by people. That was true, though never quite like we would be later that night. When we were ready to drive home, our car was completely engulfed by a mob of cheering people who had streamed into the streets, waving Greek flags to celebrate the soccer victory. People recognized me and began directing cheers at our car. Despite the warnings of our security staff, we opened our windows to wave to the crowd. I was so excited I reached out, clasping hundreds of hands. I knew there was no threat to me or to the diamond. People just wanted to share this extraordinary moment. Some of them began shouting, “Next step, Olympics!” The soccer championship had provided a timely reminder that if you start with a big enough belief, nothing is impossible.
BY THE SPRING OF 2004, I was convinced we were on track. But the public, both at home and abroad, was anxious: “Is Greece going to make it?” “Will Greece be ready on time?” The refrain I had been listening to for four years, again and again. And we had another test in front of us, a formidable one: how to put in place the huge Calatrava roof over our main Olympic stadium.
That’s why three days in May loomed so critical. For the first time, really, the whole world was watching. We were about to stage a spectacular new and unprecedented Olympic event: call it the hydraulic lift and roof plant.
The Olympic stadium roof had come to symbolize more than the Games; it was our grand ambition. It was a 269,000-square-foot steel and glass structure—an arch in two giant sections that would cover the stadium—designed by the world-renowned Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava. In the design renderings, the roof’s soaring beauty—it would peak at a height of more than 250 feet—belied the fact that it weighed seventeen thousand tons. It was as pragmatic as it was elegant; built with a special coating that reflected the sun,
the roof would ensure that the stadium remained comfortable despite the summer heat.
And not surprisingly, it was a challenge that provided a focal point for everybody who worried about Greece’s ability to execute its Games plan.
I am incapable of explaining the complex hydraulic solution that was supposed to maneuver the roof into place over the Olympic stadium. All I knew was that until we witnessed the roof in its rightful position, nobody at ATHOC, or indeed the entire country, could rest easy. And witnessing that extraordinary feat was something of an excruciating ordeal as the roof moved up into the Athens sky at a glacial pace. I would later learn that the roof was being propelled toward our destiny at a speed of approximately three inches a minute. I would never have guessed it was moving that slow.
After three long days came the magic moment: Wow! The roof was in place above the stadium! The praise was grand: “Roof Is the Toast of Athens,” announced the Evening Standard on May 11, 2004.
Once the press realized that the roof would hold they busied themselves concocting far worse scenarios than a roofless stadium. Reporters, mostly Brits and Germans, kept trying to sneak into the Olympic stadium, supposedly to demonstrate how lax the security was and how vulnerable we were to terrorist attack. A number of them were caught and detained; one British journalist made it inside and her story played big, as if she had done something very courageous.
I was fed up. They simply ignored the fact that the renovation of the stadium hadn’t been completed. Only after the renovation would the stadium go into security lockdown, and after lockdown only accredited personnel could enter the perimeter and the stadium.
My Greek Drama: Life, Love, and One Woman's Olympic Effort to Bring Glory to Her Country Page 24
