Greece assesses costs, benefits of Athens Olympiad

07/08/2008

With the Summer Games poised to begin in Beijing, Athens looks back proudly on the Olympics it hosted in 2004 but weighs the price it paid.

By Christos Ringas for Southeast European Times in Athens -- 07/08/08

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Almost four years have passed since the Olympic flame burned in Athens's Olympic Stadium, heralding the start of the last Summer Games. In the run-up to that memorable occasion, Athens enjoyed a construction boom not seen since the Periclean age. The rush of spending gave the capital a lavish, brand-new infrastructure.

Athens made particularly huge strides in transportation, with a state-of-the-art airport, a modern subway system, a commuter rail system, a metropolitan tramway and a beltway. Urban planning scholar Giorgios Tziralis credits those improvements with reducing pollution and boosting economic growth. Moreover, construction crews racing the clock built a plethora of stadiums and support facilities.

Other Athenians turned their energies to the private sector, renovating most local hotels and replacing dilapidated taxis. All three domestic telecom firms established a universal mobile telecom system for the benefit of incoming tourists.

Most Greeks look back at this era with nostalgia and pride. They perceived hosting the 2004 Games as rightful recompense for being outbid in 1996 (the centennial of the modern Olympics) by Atlanta. However, they must wrestle with the staggering cost, officially put at 11.2 billion euros, but possibly much higher. Security alone for the first post-9/11 Games cost 1 billion euros. Another host city, Montreal, needed 30 years to pay off the deficit it incurred from the 1976 Olympiad.

The major problem was and still is the use of the costly infrastructure that Athens inherited. The organising committee rejected Atlanta's option of building temporary facilities that could be rapidly dismantled. Instead, it went the more expensive route of building state-of-the-art stadiums, such as the 50m-euro weightlifting arena.

The government, now faulted by many for poor post-Olympiad planning, has found unlikely tenants for some of the buildings. There are plans to convert that weightlifting arena into university classrooms, and the badminton arena is now a 2,000-seat theatre. But other facilities, such as the pool, are abandoned or nearly so, and the open area around the principal complex remains barren and dusty, causing Tziralis to muse about the value of placing a "large park" there.

The debate boils down to whether the intangible benefits outweighed the bill to Greek taxpayers. Those who point to the gains see a "coming-out party" resembling that for previous host cities, such as an economically ascendant Tokyo in 1964 or a democratising Seoul in 1988. Athens sought to shake off its image as the capital of the EU's poorest Western member and by all accounts successfully hosted the world's greatest sporting event. Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis, mayor of Athens at the time, believes it was "worth it". Now it is Beijing's turn to ponder the same equation.