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Our Opinion

The concerns of the international media covering the Athens Olympiad have progressively moved from security and organization to the use of performance-enhancing drugs and now, finally, to the attendance at the games. While worries about security, the readiness of the venues, and the adequacy of the transport infrastructure appear to have abated, the press’s attention has been redirected toward the manifest lack of attendance throughout the games and at any number of events during the first few days. 

It’s natural for Greeks to wonder, of course, whether they can ever do anything right — and be given credit for it — in the eyes of the foreign media, although the conspiracy theories that are again being mooted by the Greek press strike us as the least intelligent response to the questions currently being posed. The problem with organizing the Olympics in their present gigantic dimensions is that you have to deal with and anticipate an enormous agenda of issues. The gravest consequence of significant delays in the whole process of preparation, therefore, is that the organizers cannot logistically and physically cover all the requirements adequately.

That there were major delays in preparing the venues and infrastructure to support the Athens games is indisputable. That security (and the pressure to deal with it at a level that was never anticipated when this bid was made) overwhelmed the organizers is also beyond dispute. Under enormous pressure to complete preparations, and under an extremely tight schedule to do so that allowed for absolutely no mistakes anywhere, the organizers focused on the obvious and took their eye off the slightly less obvious. In the end, something had to give, which is why it’s not surprising that the organizers dropped the ball on this issue. The mantra of completing the venues drowned out those voices — not only of the foreign media but of the Greek government — asking what was being done to fill the seats of the venues once they were in fact completed.

Back when Greece was being criticized heavily and on all fronts about the construction delays on the major Olympic projects, it was argued that the so-called Greek filotimo, upon which the hopes of the entire country were being placed, could not by itself complete three-lane highways. As it turned out, filotimo might have been capable of finishing road construction, but it could not save Greece on every front, let alone fill empty seats with spectators. At this point in their (over)development, the Olympics are too complex and complicated an event for quaint (and, frankly, silly) notions of filotimo to be able to deal with all their varying demands.

Yesterday, the Athens 2004 organizing committee (ATHOC 2004) announced that the Athens Olympiad had “won a gold” (!) in the attendance competition, with approximately 3.5 million tickets sold until now. There’s no doubt that many events (swimming and basketball, to name two) are very well-attended, as is evident from television coverage. Still, those of us who have been following these games from the outset have seen the depressingly low attendance in any number of events, from soccer and gymnastics to boxing and rowing. Furthermore, despite the organizing committee’s celebratory tone about tickets, the recent bickering about attendance between government officials and ATHOC2004 suggests that there is indeed a problem. The ministry of culture recently pointed out that it had repeatedly expressed concerns about attendance to the committee, only to be given assurances that this was not going to become an issue.

Well, it has, and it is. And it is because the Olympics are not — and this might surprise some people, including a few on ATHOC 2004 — about opening ceremonies, beautiful sports facilities, or luxurious accommodations for the “Olympic family.” Above all else, the Olympics are about athletes, and about their individual or collective competitions. Spectatorship is critical to competition. The IOC might care about television broadcasting the games to billions of people globally, but the athletes do not — or, rather, it is not what motivates them to perform and, more important, to excel.  Athletes want — and need — to compete in front of living, breathing, and screaming human beings. That is the essence of competition. Without an audience, competition ceases to be…competition. The majority of athletes train for years in isolation and obscurity for a moment of glory under the encouraging, and celebratory, gaze of other men and women. It is bad enough training and competing in obscurity, but to win a gold medal in obscurity seems particularly cruel treatment to impose on any athlete.

There have been many attempts to justify this situation, from arguing that August is vacation month for Greeks to the fact that the Feast of the Assumption coincided with the games’ opening. We won’t dignify these transparent excuses with a serious rebuttal. Nevertheless, it is important not to blame Greeks for what is actually an organizational blunder.

It’s clear that something intrinsic here was never anticipated by ATHOC 2004. The culture of being a spectator of sport per se, of disinterested fanship, in other words — that is, the desire to enter an arena as a spectator for the sake of it — does not really exist in Greece. It is very difficult, then, to attract people to unfamiliar sports, some of which are considered obscure even by professional sports journalists. Things become even more daunting with sports that do not have a popular following. Kayaking, boxing, gymnastics, and table tennis, for example, have never had any significant following or public attention in Greece. It is also important to point out that swimming is popular at the current Olympiad not because it has gotten more media attention in Greece than other sports; it’s because a large swimming sub-culture exists in Greece that follows the sport, and it is very popular with the middle class. There are hundreds of swimming clubs throughout Greece, and thousands of children swimming competitively; consequently, thousands of parents are involved in the whole process and, especially, as spectators and fans.

Absent a culture of fanship, and a mass following for a particular event such as swimming, national sentiment becomes the issue affecting attendance. People will attend events in which Greek athletes or teams are competing, and even more so if there is hope that they will do well. That explains the good attendance in water polo, basketball, and the matches of the Greek soccer team. Team sports such as the above also have a very strong following, as they are affiliated with particular clubs that are supported religiously.

Perhaps the organizers thought attendance was a given — although that would have been truly inexplicable since even popular sports such as soccer and basketball have declined significantly in local attendance during the last few years. The tremendous excitement over the Greek national soccer team’s run in the European Cup was obviously a unique event — and should not have fooled anybody, or lulled ATHOC 2004 into its apparent complacency. League matches have been played in front of empty stadiums for many years now.

Actually, when all is said and done, the response of Greeks to the games has been extraordinary. The fact that a country of 11 million people has absorbed most of the 3.5 million tickets sold is astonishing. But ATHOC 2004 could have taken some very simple steps to ensure that a number of events would not have taken place in front of empty seats. Major sponsors could have been asked to participate in school programs in which certain sports were promoted and tickets were made available to students; furthermore, incentives could have been offered to people outside Athens to come and attend the games. (The truth is that these are not Greece’s games but Athens’s games, and it is difficult to imagine anyone living outside the “national center” becoming genuinely involved at the level of direct spectatorship.) Finally, tickets to poorly attended events could have been bought by the government and offered to people at reduced cost, or even for free. Yes, this would have been decidedly unfair to those who paid (in some cases, dearly) for their tickets. It would have been less unfair, however, than having athletes compete in empty stadiums.