Olympics: Iron Lady sprints for glory at 2004 Games

By ALAN HUBBARD

ATHENS - She has been likened to Margaret Thatcher, but she has more style and even more clout in her handbag.

Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki is the First Lady of the Olympics, which carries a certain irony, as the ancient Greeks barred women from competing in or even watching the original Olympic Games, upon pain of death.

Now the modern Greeks are depending on her to bring home the Games they have awaited for more than a century.

Since Athens secured the 2004 Games, there have been three years of chronic delays and political feuding, and at one stage the city was so far behind with its Olympic preparations that it seemed in danger of being lapped.

"You are running a marathon when you need to sprint," the organisers were warned by an anxious International Olympic Committee amid disquieting rumours that Sydney and the 1988 hosts, Seoul, had been placed on standby.

Angelopoulos, the first woman to head an Olympic organising committee, won the Games for Athens more than three years ago. Now she is resolved to make sure they work.

This 46-year-old right-wing politician and lawyer, a mother of three who speaks five languages, is a former MP, lectures at Harvard and is married to one of the richest men in Greece, the shipping, steel and property magnate Theodore Angelopoulos.

They have homes in Athens, Switzerland, the United States and London, where they own one of the finest houses in the city.

To her staff she is Mrs A, a formidable motivator with friends in high places, who knows how to manipulate them, as well as charm them.

She certainly charmed the IOC into giving Athens the next Games, dexterously seeing off the late Primo Nebiolo and his Machiavellian attempts to manoeuvre them towards Rome.

The Greeks hailed a triumph which rectified the injustice inflicted seven years earlier when their plea to host the centenary Olympics was snubbed in favour of Atlanta, the Coca-Cola citadel, by an IOC which cynically put cash before conscience.

Her reward was to be ungraciously dumped by the Greek socialist Government. It was said she was embarrassingly close to becoming too popular and thus too dangerous a political opponent.

So she was invited to spend more time with her family, which she did happily until last June, when a panic-stricken call went out to reinstate her at the head of an Olympic show that seemed headed for national humiliation.

The Games preparations were becoming a political and operational mess, throttled by bureaucracy and bickering.

The Olympic odyssey was beginning to look very much like a Greek tragedy when Prime Minister Costas Simitas accepted IOC advice - some say it was a shotgun directive from the IOC's president, Juan Antonio Samaranch - to re-engage Angelopoulos.

She agreed to come back only on her terms, which meant a fair amount of Thatcher-like handbag-swinging as she fired and hired, bringing back several of her old team.

With a promotional flair more associated with big-fight impresarios, sport's Iron Lady promptly labelled the Athens Games "The Homecoming."

"Things are back on track," she said, after one of her regular meetings with the Prime Minister where, one suspects, there is a good deal of table-banging.

Mrs A is not someone to be messed with.

"I wouldn't say I sleep well at night, because we have a huge task ahead of us," she says. "I do not dispute that. I have never underestimated the extreme urgency of the situation. Time is our most limited resource.

"But whatever we need, we will get. Whatever is required, we will do it. We have promised, and we will deliver."

The glory that was Sydney made a rod for the back of every potential Olympic city, ending with a flourish which said: "Follow that."

Athens will not even try. They will simply do their own thing.

"We cannot be another Sydney. No one can," Angelopoulos said.

"But we will show the world something different, something unique. Ours will be a state-of-the-art Games based on Olympic tradition, but which also shows the human face of Greece."

But before she delivers, we can expect more table-thumping.

"From what I discovered when I joined the organisation last year, the IOC were right to be alarmed. What concerns me most is ensuring we get the delivery dates from the Government ministries for the various projects, and there are around 140 in all, from sports facilities to roads and transport infrastructure.

"I am afraid we have to be tough with them, to remind them of their duties. The national honour of Greece is at stake.

"A day's delay in everyday life is nothing, but in terms of the Olympics it can cause a lot of problems. But I don't like to call them problems. They are challenges."

While lacking the technical merit of Sydney, Athens will certainly score highly on artistic impression. But casting doubts on the ability of the chosen city to host the Games has become as much a part of the Olympic programme as the marathon - Sydney suffered more than its share, and there are certainly enough Cassandras around Olympia to fill a book on mythology.

The next six months represent crunch time. Projects such as the eight-lane ring road running from the new airport, due to open next week and said to be the most modern in Europe, are proceeding disturbingly slowly.

The worry is how anyone is going to get to the airport once the planes start arriving.

Greece's Byzantine business methods offer considerable scope for corruption and delays. Traffic-choked Athens has still to see work begin on the promised new hotels and the athletes' and media villages, although the excavators are now moving in on the disused US military base near Marathon, which will become the Olympic rowing course.

Yet, in many ways, Athens is actually way ahead of the Games. Some 75 per cent of the facilities are in place, most of them primed for use, and space for a vast Olympic village is being prepared amid an idyllic setting of olive groves in the shadow of Mt Parnis.

Money, you see, is not a problem. The Greek Government, with a bit of help from their lottery, are underwriting everything to the tune of $5 billion.

And the Greeks have just signed the biggest sponsorship deal in the history of the Games, worth $US70m, with Alpha, their national bank - thanks, they say, to the Olympics-friendly climate created by the spectacular success at Sydney.

Security will be the biggest headache.

"It is a big concern for us," Angelopoulos admitted. "We are not like Australia, an island in the middle of a big ocean, where everyone needs a visa.

"Greece is a popular holiday destination. People come by plane, boat, train and car. Even by bicycle or on foot.

"So we have to be especially careful, not just for the Games, for which we have a very good security operation, but in the years leading up to them."

Her personal security is particularly tight. Some years ago her husband's brother-in-law was assassinated by the 17 November terrorist group, who were also responsible for the murder of a British Embassy military attaché last year.

She laughs when you ask her if she is still politically ambitious. The Games fall in an election year and some believe she could eventually emerge as the nation's next Prime Minister. She is certainly popular enough. Others suggest she is eyeing the presidency.

What is perhaps more likely is that she could run for the apolitical post of mayor of Athens, which would give her an even more prominent role in Olympic ceremonials.

The Olympics may be coming home, and while the Games are still three years and five months away, the Greeks are the first to acknowledge that time is not on their side.

At least they are on their way, and Angelopoulos has shrewdly recruited enough Australian know-how - more than 20 experts in all, including Sydney 2000 chief David Richmond - to smooth the path to 2004.

"She'll be right" is now a familiar phrase around the city.

Such laid-back optimism is, of course, directed at the Games, but it could apply equally to the First Lady of the Olympics as she busies herself with orchestrating Athens' long-overdue lap of honour.

- INDEPENDENT