Athens: Arrested Development

摘要

Promising the romantic return of the games to Athens a century after the birth of the modern Olympic movement, the evening instead ended in an unexpected coup for Atlanta. The perceived triumph of brash commercialism over the weight of history led the newspaper Eleftheros Typos to declare that the "Olympic flame will not be lit with oil, but with Coca-Cola." Stung by emotion, the committee president, Spyros Metaxas, vowed that the city would never again bid for the Olympics. As it transpired, this was an empty threat. Speaking in Lausanne in September 1997, immediately after Athens had been awarded the 2004 Olympics, bid chair Gianna Angelopoulos acknowledged that "back in 1990 ... our desire and heritage alone [were not a] guarantee.... We realized that yes, we should improve our city. Yes, we should improve our environment. Yes, we should improve our infrastructure. It is a new bid for a new city." If you want to tell a story about the birth of a new Athens, the turn of the millennium is a convenient place to begin. The megaproject boom in the run-up to the 2004 Olympics was responsible for an inescapable form of physical transformation-a literal reshaping of the city. But this was accompanied by an influx of low-cost foreign labor from the neighboring former Communist bloc, the overnight stimulus of entry into the eurozone in 2001, and a record surge in borrowing unleashed by deregulation of mortgage lending and sudden access to cheap credit. By the time the Olympics opening ceremony arrived, and with it the climax of a concerted effort to reposition Athens as a contemporary European city before the eyes of the world, Athenians themselves were flush with the confidence fostered by an unprecedented public investment in infrastructure, matched by unprecedented private speculation in the buoyant real-estate market.