Olympics: Athens Games delays fueled Greek debt: IOC

‘If you look at the external debt of Greece, there could be up to two or three percent of that which could be attributed to the Games’: Jacques Rogge (File photo)

The Athens 2004 Games played a part in fueling Greece’s enormous debt, the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said yesterday, blaming the overhead on the organisation’s notorious delays.
“You can fairly say that the 2004 Games played their part,” Jacques Rogge told Kathimerini daily during a visit to Athens earlier in the month.
“If you look at the external debt of Greece, there could be up to two or three percent of that which could be attributed to the Games,” he said.
But Rogge insisted that the competition “could have been staged at a much lower cost, as there were delays that rendered double shifts necessary, and having people work at night does cost more.”
Many of the installations were completed just weeks before the competition with a change of government five months before the Olympics compounding delays. Rogge had later praised organisers for hosting “unforgettable, dream Games.”
The Athens Games cost around 13 billion euros, including an estimated one billion euros spent on securing the first Summer Olympics held after the Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States in September 2001.
Several of the venues constructed for the Olympics never found a viable use in the years that followed.
The Greek government is still trying to lease many of these facilities to investors to help trim a national debt of over 350 billion euros (USD 457 billion) but has not ruled out tearing down some of the stadiums if necessary.