Six months after the Athens Olympics, all is not well. Around the canoe-kayak course, in the city that hosted the world's 'unforgettable, dream games', lights that illuminated the site now swing, hopelessly, from cords of broken wire. It is hard not to miss the galloping necrosis enveloping so many of the 36 venues either purpose-built or upgraded for the Games. For the neglect does not end here.On the other side of the Olympic facility, in the inner sanctum of the world-class basketball hall, the roof is leaking. Buckets, dexterously placed around its carpeted stadium, collect droplets the size of large coins. Across town, on the ancient Marathon route, the drains are clogged. They are also blocked at the multi-million-pound building that served as the press centre during the Games. And, at the rowing centre in Skoinias, the waters have turned stagnant brown. There, officials wonder what to do with a facility now widely decried as an environmental disaster.
One of the smallest nations ever to host the globe's biggest sports event, Greece had hoped the Olympics would transform its citizens' lives as never before. Instead, they are discovering that the 16-day bonanza may have been pure folly. This week, as their government prepares to release a long-awaited bill stipulating the venues' 'post-Olympic usage', many are wondering whether staging the Games was little more than an exercise in economic flagellation.
Last week, the country's Alternate Culture Minister, Fani Palli-Petralia, admitted what Hellenes had feared most. 'We didn't have a reliable post-Olympics plan,' said the politician who headed preparations for the Games. 'Many venues were designed without their post-Olympics use in mind.'
On Tuesday, exactly 205 days after the Games opened in spectacular style, Athens's centre-right government will advertise around two dozen of the installations at one of the world's grandest real-estate fairs in Cannes. 'We've had to work through endless documents to identify what the exact legal position and permissible uses of the facilities are,' sighed Christos Hadjiemmanuil, who heads the state-run company set up to oversee the sites. 'They [the Socialist former administration] were more concerned about not facing resistance during the building process than coming up with a strategy for the post-Olympic Games period.'
| Hmmm, Socialist gummint, over-spending, rampant corruption, shoddy construction, no post-Games plan, ... nope, never saw that coming. |