Greece failing to afford athletes for London 2012 Olympics

[richard]

What happens if the country that invented the Olympics cannot afford to produce Olympic athletes? As this summer's London Games approach, that notion is causing great angst in Greece, where elite athletes are feeling the sting of austerity measures in the face of debt crisis.

The government scrapped a plan to spend nearly $10 million a year on Olympic preparation, according to the Hellenic Olympic Committee. Athletes say their financial stipends are frequently months late, and it is common for coaches to go months without paychecks. Training centers have fallen into disrepair or have closed. A sports psychologist who counsels Greek athletes is working pro bono these days.

Greeks will compete in London, but they will perhaps be limping a bit at the opening ceremony July 27. "Young athletes are very skeptical about continuing when they see that the top athletes are not receiving what they deserve, that they are not supported as they should be," Vassilios Sevastis, the president of the Greek amateur athletics association, known by the acronym SEGAS, said through an interpreter. "This is the major risk."

Greece has competed in every Summer Olympics since the modern Games began in 1896, when Athens hosted. Even during the Great Depression, Greece managed to send athletes to Los Angeles in 1932 - the year it defaulted on its external debt. For Winter Games, Greece usually sends a handful of skiers.

To build a team for London, the country's Olympic committee has pursued private-sector sponsors and has increased its dependence on aid from the International Olympic Committee. Now the growing concern is whether Greece, the host of the 2004 Summer Games, which have come to symbolize a decade of overspending, can sustain this course for long.

Like other elite athletes, the pole-vaulter Kostas Filippidis said it had been several months since he received his monthly $1,400 stipend from the athletics federation.

"Of course it's a thought, but I cannot be worried about this every day," he said, adding that he lived rent-free in an apartment owned by his father. "Taking part in the Olympics for my country makes me very proud."

Filippidis trains indoors at the Olympic Stadium complex. He said the heat was on for just one hour a day. On a recent visit, just a few athletes were training there, and a large plastic container was positioned in a long-jump lane - not to be leapt over but to catch water leaking from the skylight above.

Alkisti Avramidou, a water polo player, said that "I think twice" before spending even one euro and that it was becoming difficult to ask her parents for help. Her father, a doctor, has seen his salary cut in half; her mother, a civil servant, has not been paid in several months. With the exception of going to practice, Avramidou avoids driving because she cannot afford gasoline, which costs about $8 a gallon.

Sevastis said the organization received only three-quarters of the $9.6 million budgeted for 2011, and that was after an injection of $1.6 million in December. A month earlier, the association's board suspended operations to protest. The December infusion allowed coaches and athletes to be paid, Sevastis said, but overall, the association provides money to just 23 elite athletes, compared with 60 two years ago.

A lingering and delicate issue, given Greece's high unemployment is a jobs program that elite athletes had relied on. In the free-spending days, athletes who won medals or finished high in international competitions were given public-sector jobs to provide salaries while they trained and competed for Greece.

In practice, they became no-show jobs, but a new law requires the athletes to go to work.

"This is a paradox," said Sofia Bekatorou, who won a sailing gold medal in Athens and a bronze in Beijing. "You get the job to do your sport, but then you're not able to do it."

Bekatorou, a representative of athletes to the olympic committee, said other countries had used similar programs. Without it, young athletes have little incentive to devote time to training, advocates say.

The way to London, said Spyros Capralos, the president of the Hellenic Olympic Committee, involves new relationships with the private sector - not a simple task in a shrinking economy.

"In the past, it was easier to get money from the Greek state, so not much effort was made or nobody really cared," said Capralos, the chief executive of a shipping company and one of the leaders of the Athens 2004 organizing committee.

The Olympic committee's four-year plan was to spend about $40 million, but after the committee received a $10 million installment from the government in 2009, Capralos said, the Olympic preparation budget was eliminated. He has signed new sponsors, including the betting company OPAP, which is contributing $6.5 million. (Greece holds 34% in OPAP.) Some federations, like gymnastics, have found their own sponsors.

Vasilis Tsolakidis, who will be a first-time Olympian in the parallel bars at 32, receives federation support, but said his family's business and personal sponsor, Traffic Oil, made his full-time training possible. He and his wife are raising four children ranging in age from 2 to 11.

Maria Psychountaki, a University of Athens sports psychologist, who has worked with athletes for 22 years, said that in the past two years, they were more stressed, adding, "They're worried about finding money to live."


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