Unforgettable Games
Talu
Athens T et's face it. Unless you were at the j I Athens Olympics, you could not feel the unmatchable gravitas and pure joy. One of the great appeals of the Games was that it offered the glamour of the old. Olympia was a delight, as was Athens. I have never seen the city look or feel as good as this. Traffic flowed like never before, with gleaming, new, air-conditioned trams, trains and buses making the entire loop of the ancient city in a matter of less than an hour. Tourists and ticket-holders jammed public transport, with special guards and volunteers everywhere and ever ready to help. I don't know how they went about educating them, but the volunteers are the real heroes of these Games. Polite, friendly, eager to assist, they made everyone feel welcome. This was the old Greece, where filoxenia, the welcoming of strangers, used to be paramount. The weather helped; 29 degrees Celsius and very dry is perfect, and let the hacks bang on with tortured similes and repeated clichés about cauldrons and infernos.
What puzzled me was the attitude of the hacks. In the past I have been among the most virulent critics of my country, but this is our finest peacetime hour. Mind you, not if you read what the hacks have to say. Let's begin with security. In my opinion, there was never any question that the Greek army and police could not handle it. But so much was made of it by the American media — they do, after all, have to protect American multimillionaire basketball players — that the threat of terror leading up to the Games overshadowed everything else. There were rumours galore about sights being inaccessible by private cars, yet my driver, without special accreditation, drove everywhere safely and on time Then comes the doping. 'To cheat in Ancient Olympia is a sacrilege,' wrote an American reporter. Thank God, he followed this with: 'But what about Seoul or Sydney?' Doping is pretty much an American invention, with plenty of US athletes sitting out the Games as a result. The coach of the 100-metre winner has had six of his athletes test positive in the past. We Greeks were not best pleased following the Kenteris-Thanou scandal to read that the United States had called in the drug squad to divert attention from the fact that American athletes were doping like rock stars. Counting medals is what the Games are all about in America, but as the Independent shrewdly pointed out. America won a total of 97 medals in Sydney, but the European Union won 281. So much for those swaggering Yankee bullies. The best moment, at least for me, was when the US beat Greece in a tightly fought basketball game. I was at Gianna Angelopoulos's house and screaming my head off in her rather elegant drawingroom. The place was crawling with government ministers and big shots. In the arena itself, six extremely large African Americans were noisily and vulgarly cheering for their own side and using the F-word as if it was going out of style. The Greeks told them to desist. Using the F-word, that is. They refused. A fight ensued and the fuzz was called in. 'Take them out, otherwise we'll lynch them,' said a Greek. And out they went. For once I was on the side of the many. I cheered their exit as loudly as I cheered our valiant but failed effort.
It looks like a double standard, and probably it is, but why is it that when I see obese Americans munching on Coke and giant hot dogs and chanting 'USA, USA', it sounds like the worst kind of chauvinism as well as unsportsmanlike conduct, and when I hear the Greeks cheering lustily 'Hellas, Hellas'. it sounds patriotic and sportsmanlike? There is something of the bully in Uncle Sam, and perhaps that is why the greatest cheer of all was given to the worst swimmer of the Games, the young Palestinian who finished last and way off the pace, and timidly came out of the water. There is something very moving about the nobility of failure, and the Palestinian — who trains alone in a 25metre cold swimming-pool with guns going off all around him — knows all about it. As did we who cheered him to the rafters.
As I write, Fani Halkias, our great 400metre hurdler, is about to run for gold. A fat slob from the Daily Mail (the paper unwisely publishes his picture along his byline) has warned us to beware of Greeks breaking records. How original. And how brave. Like the rest of the hacks who have not killed themselves to report that the ticket-revenue target was topped before reaching the halfway mark. Sure, some of the venues were empty, but who cares to go and watch all sorts of women playing softball, or others shooting arrows? There was not a place to be had when real sports were on. and judo, wrestling, swimming and the finals of track and field were always sold out. This was the best time I ever had in my birthplace. I had five fellow athletes staying on my boat and, after training hard each day and watching even harder, I enjoyed myself immensely showing them Athens by night. This has been the warmest, nicest Games ever, and it's the Greeks and the city that made them unforgettable.
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