Just a couple of months after the last competitors’ bus got lost in Atlanta, cities have begun the race to host the 2004 Games. John Duncan reports
THEY are not at all what you would expect. There are 15 of them, slightly stern-looking, definitely bleary-eyed, weighed down by details of infrastructure and facilities and statistics, and carrying, in their pens, the power to put a city on the world stage for two weeks in August 2004 and on the world map for a long time.
In three months, finishing on December 10, they will have been to St Petersburg, Stockholm, Lille, Seville, Rome, Istanbul, Athens, San Juan, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Cape Town. They arrived in Greece this week and by December even The Who won’t have seen as many stadiums as this lot.
The 15 are the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC)vanguard, the technical assessment committee for the 11 cities bidding to host the 2004 Games. They are charged with making sure that, after Atlanta, the IOC does not get fooled again.
But their life is far from the freeloading that is generally associated with Olympic bidding. “We have not arranged to even take them out for dinner,” said Gianna Angelopoulos, president of the Athens bid.
“They told us they would prefer to stay in their rooms and read the bid documents, so we are respecting that.” Rehearsals of where the 15 will go, the exhibitions and displays they will see, the VIPs they will meet, amendments to the bundles they will lug to their next port of call, have been going on for two weeks. Those bid documents are the first step in a process that, in Athens’s case, has already lasted eight years if you count the dramatic failure of their bid for 1996.
The bundle of three volumes weighs 3kg in a charming brown cardboard box, not as nice as Barcelona’s (which was metal and stood upright like a small filing cabinet) but more pleasing than Atlanta’s (a tacky bundle of colourful documents in a blue box). The details inside, from average temperature, to ground plans of the venues, to telecom price bands and capacities in dollars and kilobits for unscheduled Eutelsat transmission, are mind-numbingly thorough.
Athens is a serious candidate. There are already 40 full-time staff attached to the bid team in their imposing Zappeion headquarters and they have been ferrying some of the world’s press to the city for a couple of weeks now.
Whether they will actually win nobody will know until September 1997, but the first hurdle is approval by the fastidious 15, granted or refused when they whittle the list down to five cities in March.
Athens was previously polluted and run-down, deemed too reliant on cars and too tainted by pollution and gridlock. So the government and city council are spending $2,6-billion increasing the size of their metro and doubling passenger capacity to 780 000 per day. The airport was deemed old-fashioned so a new one is being built on a site north of the city with capacity to handle 16-million passengers a year.
New roads, new stadiums, a population who are 96% behind the bid, a programme to reduce pollution by 35%, $11-billion to be invested in information technology. All impressive stuff.
This Athens bid could hardly be better timed after the commercialism and tackiness of Atlanta. The mood may well be that a return to the spiritual home of the games is overdue, something emphasised if one visits ancient Olympia, where the first games were held and which now houses an Olympic academy aimed at propagating the slightly nebulous values of Olympianism.
The original Olympic stadium is there too, and with its original grassy banks that would probably not pass muster for today’s IOC technocrats. They might be more impressed with the ancient Olympian approach to sporting misdemeanour: cheats were forced to erect a statue of Zeus at the entrance to the ancient stadium with their name, parents’ and grandparents’ names and home town inscribed on the base to act as an example to every athlete going into the stadium.
l The technical commission is charged with whittling down the 11 cities who want to host the 2004 Olympic Games to five. These will then be considered by the 91-strong IOC .
Though they are supposed to restrict their considerations to technical merit, only the most naive expect them to ignore completely the vagaries of Olympic politics.
Cape Town will make it unless the commission is put off by South Africa’s lack of political experience or possible organisational problems. But an African Olympics is long overdue. Rome and Stockholm are also virtually assured because of excellent facilities, though Stockholm’s population is not keen.
Athens and Buenos Aires are likely to sneak in, Buenos Aires because it is in Latin America, a vital IOC constituency, and Athens because a return to tradition is desirable after Atlanta.