OLYMPIC EPIL GUE

The Olympic Games are like a weekend drug binge on a national scale. It is a glorious merry-go-round while it lasts, followed by a hangover like no other. While London was dressing itself up for 2012 Games, I visited Greece - the host of 2004 Olympics, now in the middle of a profound crisis. Today the former Olympic venues lie derelict and vandalized - the Modern Ruins come to echo the ancient ruins from the heydays of classical Greece.

Yet it’s not just a story of Athens 2004 Olympic Games and its legacy, in fact it is as much a story about peeking behind the childhood fairy tale and discovering its troubled history. Neither is this an anti-sports story, if anything, it’s the very opposite - a cry for the lost ideals of yesterday.

Kristjan-Jaak Tammsaar

(Preview of 10 images from the book with corresponding captions. Please do not hesitate to inquire for additional info and photographs.)

whereintheworldiskj@gmail.com

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Olympic rings on the judges’ tables in the OAKA (Olympic Athletic Center of Athens) complex.Marousi, Athens. June 2012

The Olympic rings - arguably the most universally recognised symbol of the games is widely believed to date from the ancient times. In fact, it was designed by the founder of the modern Olympic Games Baron Pierre de Coubertin, to symbolise the first five modern Olympics for a 1914 World Olympic Congress - however, today the rings are recognised to symbolize the ‘five continents’. Coubertin never said anything about the colours of the rings representing different continents - they were chosen to represent the colours on the flags of all participating countries.The Olympic flag with the five interlaced rings was first hoisted at the 1920 Antwerp Games but it wasn’t until the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany that the symbol was really burned in the collective consciousness. It was Hitler’s favourite film-maker Leni Riefenstahl who had the five rings carved into a rock at the site of the Delphi Oracle in Greece while filming her tribute movie ‘Olympia’. Years later two British authors mistook the rings for an ancient inscription, recorded their error in writing and spawned a false myth.

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The ‘Agora’ (gathering place; assembly in ancient Greek city-states) welcomed guests into the OAKA complex.Marousi, Athens. June 2012

It is widely hoped by the host cities that part of the Olympic legacy will lead to an increasing influx of tourists, yet what exactly is supposed to be appealing about empty stadiums is left unexplained. The one stadium that does still enjoy its steady share of tourists is not a state of the art contemporary arena, but the reconstruction of the ancient Panathinaiko stadium.Many of the foreign tourists who visit the country during Olympics are the so-called “time-switchers”: people who were planning to come anyway and then coincided their trip with the games. It took two years after Athens Olympics until the visitor numbers to Greece recovered to their pre-Games level.

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The torch that held the Olympic flame stretches above the main stadium at the height of 120m in the OAKA complex.Marousi, Athens. July 2012

Today the Olympic flame and the torch-route that spans the continents has become another beloved symbol of the Games that is widely understood to date back to antique times. It is in fact another ritual that dates back to the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany and was adopted with Hitler’s approval as he recognised the Ancient Greeks as the forerunners to his Third Reich. The torches were produced and imprinted with the logo of German industrial giant Krupp, a major arms manufacturer. Over 3000 runners passed through Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia on their way to Berlin, all countries that later fell under the occupation of Nazi Germany. For the 2010 games in Vancouver, it was coincidentally the second largest military contractor in Canada, Bombardier, who produced the Olympic torches.

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As the Second World War caused the suspension of Olympic Games in 1940 and 1944, Britain was up next in 1948. Inexplicably, the British organisers chose to keep this pseudo-traditional invention of the Nazi propaganda machine and the Greece gave it another spin when in 2004 it was determined to have the first global torch relay. The Olympic torch covered the 260km distance from ancient Olympia to Athens with a 78 day detour that stretched over 78,000 kilometres.

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CCTV camera watches over empty venues in the OAKA complex.Marousi, Athens. June 2012

As part of the highly exaggerated security measures forced on Greece due to Athens 2004 being the first post-9/11 Olympics, a vast CCTV surveillance network was installed not only inside the Olympic venues but also throughout the metropolitan area. The highly sophisticated cameras came with microphones and a speech-recognition software. The software was capable of collecting conversations from long distances, which would then transcribe them into digital text that was searched for suspicious patterns. Not only was the system capable of transcribing Greek and English but also all other major European languages plus Arabic and Farsi. Unsurprisingly, the extraordinary cost of the system was later used as a justification to leave the network in place and it wasn’t long after the Olympics that these CCTV systems were monitoring political rallies and demonstrations in Athens. Civilian resistance has come in many forms, such as knocking down the CCTV poles, ripping off its cables, spray painting the lens, covering cameras with black hoods, arson etc.

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In 2006 the Greek government officially announced that the mobiles phones of then Greek Prime Minister, most of his ministers and many other top government and military officials were hacked and tapped by an unknown source during the Athens 2004 Games and for nearly a year after. It is thought that the phone taps were organized by US secret agencies, for reasons related to US mistrust of the Greek government and its capacity to ensure the Olympics security.

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Empty flagpoles rooted in concrete at the OAKA complex.Marousi, Athens. June 2012

When South Korea was awarded the Olympics in 1981, it was a military dictatorship pursuing to legitimise its authoritarian regime. The plan backfired and the approaching Olympics turned out to be a catalyst for the break-out of pro-democracy protests. The political crisis that followed arouse suspicions that the games might be shifted from Seoul to another city. To avoid international humiliation, the military regime finally agreed to rewrite the constitution and hold the presidential election - the first free and democratic election in the country’s history. It is widely recognized that the Olympics with its contingent attention were a key factor in bringing democracy to South Korea. Curiously it worked just as well for South-Korean sports legacy - since 1988 Games in Seoul, the country has finished out of top 10 in the Olympic medal table only once, while before 1988 it had only appeared there once.Unfortunately South-Korea has so far proven to be an exception rather than the rule and the 1936 Games in Berlin, 1968 in Mexico City, 1980 in Moscow and 2008 in Beijing have failed to dent the authoritarian systems. In these cases the authorities ended up cynically using the Olympics as an excuse to round up dissidents and homeless.

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If anything, the Beijing Olympics led to a deterioration of human rights and freedom in China. “It has reversed the clock,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch in 2011.But it was the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City which came with the gravest consequences. There had been unrest in the country for months ahead of the Games, largely among students, who felt that a country with so much poverty should not be spending hundreds of millions on the Games. Reports of deaths and injuries and photographs of tanks opposite the main Olympic stadium had caused international unease. Ten days before the Games were due to open, the ticking time-bomb finally exploded when at a meeting in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, attended by over 10,000 people - students, academics and trade unionists, there were calls for the overthrow of the Government.The army opened fire on people in what is now known as the Tlatelolco massacre. There is no accurate figure on the people killed but it was certainly over 260, with at least another 1,200 wounded. Inexplicably, IOC decided to pursue with the Games in Mexico City, legitimizing the heinous acts of the brutal regime. As the opposition to the Government was utterly smashed, the games did proceed without any interferences under the cruelly ironic slogan

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Swastika and the ‘antifa’ symbol compete with the mosaics of Olympic wreaths in the OAKA complex.Marousi, Athens. June 2012

Eight years after the Games, Greece is in the middle of a profound crisis. While the state struggles to provide even basic services and the suicide rate in the country has almost doubled, the extreme-right Golden Dawn party has cynically manipulated people’s fear of the unknown to gain 7 per cent of the national vote in 2012 summer elections - throwing them from obscurity to winning 21 seats in parliament. Golden Dawn’s logo, seen here on the right, is an undisguised retake on Nazi swastika. Today the city seems to be in the grips of a turf war, with swastikas and ‘antifa’ signs seemingly covering every available surface, marking an ever-shifting front line between the mindsets of extreme-left and extreme-right. Brutal unprovoked attacks on immigrants have become a regular occurrence and the Greek police, known for being openly ultra-nationalist, have been repeatedly arresting immigrants who are visiting their friends in hospitals, instead of going after the culprits.

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Phone booth stands in the middle of an empty parking slot in the Helleniko complex.Hellenikon, Athens. June 2012

The vast coastal complex of Helleniko, three times larger than Monaco, stands on the site of Athens’ former international airport. It’s a forlorn sight with a number of stadiums draped across its open space.In 2012 Greece signed an investment deal with Qatar worth a potential $5 billion that could see a major redevelopment of Helleniko Olympic Complex. Left-wing opposition parties criticized the deal, with the leader of the small Left Coalition party saying it would turn Hellenikon into „an Arab casino.“ Coincidentally, ahead of London 2012 Games, the Qatari ruling family’s property company obtained more than half of the London’s Olympic Village in a deal that left UK taxpayers £275million out of pocket.

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Softball stadium lies overgrown with weed in the Helleniko complex.Helleniko, Athens. June 2012

Softball is a sport with little or no following in Greece, which inexplicably saw a permanent venue built, rather than a temporary one. Due to the late start and delays it was apparently easier and sometimes quicker, though always more expensive, to build permanent structures over the temporary ones. According to Don Porter, the president of The International Softball Federation, the organisation had made an offer to maintain and use the venue years ago but never received an answer. Nearby, the former baseball stadium also stands empty - another obscure sports among the football-mad Greeks. Authorities tried to generate interest by using the baseball stadium for football but soon realised the triangular shape of a baseball pitch did not easily translate into a rectangular football field, with VIP seats located in the corner, rather than at midfield.

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OLYMPIC EPILOGUE

The Olympic Village, next to the Tatoi Air Base, stood surrounded by an electric fence.Tatoi, Athens. June 2012

Since Athens was the first post-9/11 Olympic location, the security itself was as much a spectacle as any actual Olympic event. For the first time, the Olympic city was surrounded by an impenetrable shield of anti-aircraft missile launchers, including one on the Tatoi airfield next to the Olympic Village. Around 70,000 Greek police and armed forces troops were involved in the security operation with its price-tag of $1.5 billion exceeding that of Sydney’s by six times! American troops assisted the Greeks in running a mammoth three-week training exercise codenamed ‘Shield of Hercules 2004’, to prepare for different ‘catastrophic scenarios’ such as dirty-bomb attacks and hijackings. Foreign soldiers from a Czech NATO unit, specializing in bacteriological and chemical warfare, were also positioned in Greece. Chemical sensors were placed around Athens and US troops were stationed on battleships offshore.

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All this despite little, if any evidence that a terror attack was likely to occur. The fear of terrorism came from the top down, from the freshly found US hegemony that had just seen the “liberation” of Iraq based on the false premises of existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction. That is exactly why the security in Athens, and ever since, has been so extreme and disproportionate. Measures taken in response to a specific threat can generally be targeted and unobtrusive, while measures driven by a general sense of fear and paranoia are bound to be sweeping and indiscriminate. For few weeks, Athens effectively became a temporary battleground in America’s war on terror.

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The vandalised slate in the empty fountain inscribed with the medal winners of 2004 Athens Olympics.Tatoi, Athens. June 2012

Coubertin’s premonition rings as true today, if not more, as it did 85 years ago, when he spoke amidst ancient ruins of Olympia in his post-retirement stage as the IOC president:“...My friends and I have not laboured to restore the Olympic Games to you in order to make them an object fit for a museum or a cinema; nor is it our wish that mercantile or electoral interest should seize upon them. Our object in reviving an institution twenty-five centuries old was that you should become new adepts of the religion of sport, as our great ancestors conceived it.”For Coubertin, ‘religion’ meant a pursuit of perfection. In his vision, the Olympic athlete would not regard sport as an end but as means for acquiring higher values in order to better serve the ideal of man. Coubertin stayed true to his message until the very end, writing few days before his death in 1937:“Effort is the supreme joy. Success is not a goal, but a means to aim still higher. The individual has worth only in relation to humanity. He is created to act without giving up and to die with resignation.”

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OLYMPIC EPILOGUE