The Olympics that broke Greece

Eight years after the Athens Olympics, many venues have been left to rot

 Excerpt:

The Greek embassy estimated that it cost Greece €8.954 billion to host the Summer Olympic Games in 2004, including the construction of the Olympic Village and several shiny new athletic venues. Since then, though, many of those venues have been abandoned, making one Olympic legacy a set of decaying structures.

Some of the venues have gotten a bit more love than others. In the last two years, the Olympic Stadium has been used by a local soccer club (although it has been set on fire during football riots). The athlete's village has been converted into worker housing, and the hockey venue hosted the Special Olympics last year, although debris from those games is still lying around. Otherwise, many venues are used infrequently or have been abandoned entirely, pools given over to frogs, the taekwondo and handball arena used rarely for non-sporting events. Sport-specific venues, like the softball venue (a sport not played in Greece) and the beach volleyball stadium (usually played on one of Greece's actual beaches), have found little use beyond the occasional concert. For many in Greece, these venues serve as an unpleasant reminder of the country's previous excess spending in light of its current financial woes.

Comment: More here. See previous post.

Remember that Greek spending spree?

Greek Financial Crisis: Did 2004 Athens Olympics Spark Problems In Greece?

Excerpt:

When it comes to overspending, Greece gets the gold medal.

Governments in the Greek capital of Athens haven't balanced a budget in nearly 40 years, and the country narrowly averted bankruptcy in May before panicky European partners grudgingly put up massive rescue loans.

While many factors are behind the crippling debt crisis, the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens has drawn particular attention.

If not the sole reason for this nation's financial mess, some point to the games as at least an illustration of what's gone wrong in Greece.

Their argument starts with more than a dozen Olympic venues – now vacant, fenced off and patrolled by private security guards. Stella Alfieri, an outspoken anti-Games campaigner, says they marked the start of Greece's irresponsible spending binge.

"I feel vindicated, but it's tragic for the country ... They exploited feelings of pride in the Greek people, and people profited from that," said Alfieri, a former member of parliament from a small left-wing party. "Money was totally squandered in a thoughtless way."

The 2004 Athens Olympics cost nearly $11 billion by current exchange rates, double the initial budget. And that figure that does not include major infrastructure projects rushed to completion at inflated costs. In the months before the games, construction crews worked around the clock, using floodlights to keep the work going at night.

In addition, the tab for security alone was more than $1.2 billion.

Six years later, more than half of Athens' Olympic sites are barely used or empty. The long list of mothballed facilities includes a baseball diamond, a massive man-made canoe and kayak course, and arenas built for unglamorous sports such as table tennis, field hockey and judo.

Comment: And remember that stupid mascot! (Images)

Flashback: Olympic debt - Greek edition

Greek debt spirals after Olympics

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Greece is facing a massive budget deficit as it tries to absorb the cost of the Olympic Games.

The expected 7bn euro ($8.6bn; £4.8bn) burden means the national deficit is set to hit 5.3% in 2004, said Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis.

He said the previous government was to blame, for concealing the extent of Greece's economic troubles.

"A large part of Olympic, social and other spending was not written up in the budget," he said.

"The real deficit was not recorded... The public debt exceeds even the most pessimistic of estimations."

Flash forward to 2010!


Euro Tumbles on Greece Concerns

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Moody's warned Greek authorities that if the country doesn't stick to its austerity plan, its credit ratings will be cut, with the magnitude of the downgrade depending on how much the government deviates from the plan

Comment: Google "Greek + Debt" or "Greece + Debt" for hundreds of articles about this crisis! Blame it all on the Olympics? Absolutely NOT! But governments need to learn to say "no" like Colorado did in 1972!

Olympic economics

A $1 Billion Hangover From an Olympic Party

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Well before the Games began, the global recession pushed several of the Games’s sponsors, including Nortel Networks and General Motors, into bankruptcy. Whistler Blackcomb, the resort that is hosting the Alpine skiing events, will soon be sold at auction.

Security costs, first estimated at $165 million, are now headed toward $1 billion.

Still, organizers insist the operating budget will break even. But that forecast includes $423 million in emergency money from the International Olympic Committee, and detailed financial information will not appear until after the Games are over.

As for Vancouver’s municipal government and the taxpayers, the bad news is already in. The immediate Olympic legacy for this city of 580,000 people is a nearly $1 billion debt from bailing out the Olympic Village development. Beyond that, people in Vancouver and British Columbia have already seen cuts in services like education, health care and arts financing from their provincial government, which is stuck with many other Olympics-related costs.

Comment: Denver (Colorado actually!) did the right thing to turn down the Olympics. More below. An Minnesota taxpayers .... think twice before we bid to host!

Colorado only state ever to turn down Olympics

Colorado stunned the world in 1972.

With a brash young lawyer-lawmaker named Dick Lamm leading the way, residents said they didn't want the 1976 Winter Olympics.

And they said it in a big way. The landmark vote on Nov. 7, 1972, wasn't even close -- 514,228 to 350,964. A 59.4 percent majority said they weren't willing to spend tax dollars to have the Games in their state.

2020 Summer Olympics

Legislation has been introduced in the Minnesota Legislature to create a task force to explore a 2020 Olympic bid for Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The city's past Olympic bid history included unsuccessful bids in 1932, 1948, 1952 (when the city finished second to Helsinki to host the Summer Games), and 1956. The city also finished second to Atlanta as the U.S. bid city for the 1996 Summer Olympics. TCF Bank Stadium is expandable to 80,000 seats and could serve as the Twin Cities' Olympic Stadium

Whistler's luge track

Comment: Two articles (one from the NYTimes, other from the WSJ) and the related graphics. Interesting stuff.

NYTimes graphic


NYTimes: Luge Athlete’s Death Casts Pall Over Games

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The accident will raise questions not only about the safety of the track

WSJ: Graphic


WSJ: Speed and Commerce Skewed Track's Design

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Driven in part by the desire to locate the luge and bobsled track for the 2010 Vancouver Games in a high-traffic tourist area with cold temperatures, planners chose a valley at Whistler resort that was steeper and narrower than sites of previous Olympic tracks, according to press reports and interviews with those involved.

The result was a track whose speeds marked a quantum leap in a sport where even small increases require big adjustments from the athletes. After trials of the track in 2008, the course's German designer says he told the Vancouver Games' organizers and the international luge and bobsledding governing bodies that he was revising the track's projected luge speed upward by 5.5%—to 96 miles an hour—nearly nine miles an hour faster than the standing 2000 world speed record.

According to 2008 engineering documents and letters reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, officials signed off on the course's speeds. By last year, some of these officials said such speeds are unsafe and recommended that courses built in the future be slower.

9/11 truck featured in Olympics' ad

Give this pickup truck the gold

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They parked near the south tower in time to survive the first collapse and then the second. I watched Monahan immediately afterward crawl into the ruins to search for the 11 missing firefighters from his firehouse, Engine 24/Ladder 5.

When he finally returned to his Silverado, Monahan saw that the falling debris of the south tower had stopped inches short of his front bumper. The surrounding vehicles had been gutted by fire and the truck's front lights had melted into what looked like huge tears.

The steering wheel had also begun to melt and the interior of the cab was singed. Monahan reached in to turn the ignition key and was astonished to hear the engine start right up.

Somebody operating a wrecker helped clear a path for Monahan to pull away. He changed a front tire that had been bubbled by the heat and he headed for the firehouse.

"The first victory of World War III," Monahan announced.

Somebody salvaged the oversized nameplate from Ladder 5's destroyed rig and affixed it to the side of the pickup that ferried them to and from The Pit over the days that followed.

The sight of them going by in this burned and battered truck with "Ladder 5" bolted to the side always drew a rousing response from folks in the street.

"Every time we got in the truck, they were just cheering," Monahan said. "It was American spirit at its best. ... 'You can't keep us down!'"

Comment: Pics in linked article.

Worst Olympics' mascots

The best and worst Olympic mascots

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Athena and Phevos were mumu-wearing no-necked flipper-armed deformities whose feet were so gout-ridden that they were forced to go barefoot. They were supposed to look like ancient dolls, but many Greeks found the figures stereotyping and degrading. A huge high-profile mascot failure.

...
With his lightning bolt eyebrows, big red shoes, Donny Osmond teeth and ringed multi-colored tail, Izzy appeared to have been designed by a team of kids with attention deficit disorder. ... Bob Costas called the mascot “a genetic experiment gone horribly, ghastly wrong.”

Comment: I found this humorous!