Myth that the country went bankrupt from the 2004 Olympics

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of their success Olympic Games in 2004, the president of the Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games “Athens 2024”, mr. Gianna Angelopoulou-Daskalaki he was hosted on the ERTNews show “To the Center” with Giorgos Kouvaras.

“I was thinking that all these tens of thousands of people, workers, volunteers, employees, taxi drivers, bus drivers, men and women, (…) all these people who watched the games from the stadiums, from the television – of course, we sold 3.5 millions of tickets and cheap tickets, the cheapest was then 10 euros. All of them, the 4.5 billion viewers who saw us, all this world who saw Greece and Hellenism travel, uniting continents. You know it was the first time the Olympic Torch Relay joined five continents. We went to 33 cities, thousands of people ran, strangers, acquaintances. All these people have kept something unique in their hearts from this experience” initially described Mrs. Angelopoulou-Daskalaki.

At the same time, he emphasized that the Olympic Games were a “national bet” while adding that “society was the one that believed in the goal, was inspired and decided to do everything”.

Afterwards, Mrs. Angelopoulou-Daskalaki responded in the following way to the theory of many who have connected the holding of the Olympic Games with the bankruptcy of the country: “When the Olympic Games are held, a country takes them. The country’s government, any government mediates the next seven years until the games are held. She is obliged.

He signs a contract with the International Organizing Committee that he will do all the Olympic works and all the other infrastructure that a country, a city needs to host the Olympic Games, and the Organizing Committee, which has a separate budget, has the budget for the games for those days .

We had a budget of 2,098,400,000 euros. We organized the matches and returned to the state. We had a surplus of 130 million euros. So, in short, the government in our own budget had a participation of 7%. Where did we get all the rest? From the tickets, from international and domestic sponsorships, from the television rights, from the IOC.

The cost of the Olympic Games in Greece was 6.4 billion euros. We are the second cheapest Olympic Games since Los Angeles 1932 with official figures.

In the year of the Games, GDP increased by 2.5%. If we had used the tangible and intangible heritage, we would have gained 0.2% of GDP every year. Therefore, this is a myth. (…) This myth was invented by those who hate the achievements of the Greeks”.

Mrs. Angelopoulou-Daskalaki noted that “Greece with the Olympics is back on the map. We have gained an international reputation. We won a moment, all of us because we all participated, of great national self-confidence. We’ve been through a lot since, but that never goes away. We won Olympic infrastructure, regardless of whether the state did not use it afterwards. We won amazing public infrastructure that was needed anyway. Do you know how thousands of people were trained with the latest technology requirements in all fields? Tens of thousands of people.”

Regarding the intense distrust and criticism regarding whether Greece could cope with such a large event, Ms. Angelopoulou-Daskalaki emphasized that “nobody believed it. That is, then we suffered fraudulent attacks. We were laughed at by all the powerful media when we said that we will host over 10,000 spectators and as many attendants and judges and we will have 17,000 journalists in them. And all this during the games. The competition season is the most complex, the most demanding, it is the biggest event, as they say, in peacetime. Dozens of things had to run at the same time every day safely, to the second.

So when they saw that all this was happening, think that on the days of the games there were 301 games because every game has a men’s, women’s, etc. qualifier, it’s not just 28. When we told them, they laughed, they literally laughed in our faces. In other words, there were times when my colleagues also held me back and I told them to be patient, we will show them, and in the following days the headlines appeared on TV, we apologize, you are amazing”.