May 9, 2012
In the soft Attic light, Athens's Olympic sports complex does not look like such a bad place. Men and women jog gently under its great steel arches, athletes go in and out of its giant installations, cyclists race up and down its lanes. Just, one thinks, as it should be, eight years after the birthplace of the Olympics, the city that invented the greatest show on Earth, defied sceptics by holding its own "dream games".
But then you notice little things. The clocks have stopped – along the corridors of endless basement offices, outside changing rooms beneath and around the site's velodrome.
The light fixtures are rusty; there's tumbleweed almost everywhere and graffiti on the walls. And then, on closer inspection, you see that behind their peeling paint several of the buildings are in a state of decay and that, locked behind wrought iron fences, dozens of bigger edifices and hundreds of little office blocks are standing idle.
As the sun dips over the Acropolis and the light fades, the atmosphere, already forlorn, becomes strangely forbidding. Eight years after hosting the Games and as Greece prepares to light the flame ahead of London 2012 in Olympia, Athens's Olympic park, once billed as one of the most complete European athletics complexes, is no testimony to past glories. Instead, it is indicative of misplaced extravagance, desolation and despair.
"They've let the whole place go to pot," says Dimitris Dimitriou, a bank employee escorting his nine-year-old son to a fencing lesson at one of the site's five installations. "The main stadium is a bit better off because it's used by football teams but if you look around everything is rotting and rusting. The toilets are filthy, the showers stink and there's no hot water. I don't think anything here has been cleaned for years."
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