Journalist's Journal
By Duncan Mackay Posted Jan 1 2005
EPA/Ludbrook
Photographers aim their lenses at the women's beach volleyball bronze medal match as a volunteer looks on.
Of all the thousands of words written at the conclusion of the Athens Olympic Games, probably the ones that provided the most satisfaction for the Greeks appeared in The Times of London.
“To Athens, an apology,” writer Owen Slot began. “The world media has let you down. We said these Olympic Games would be a disaster, and they have not been.”
In the months leading up to the games, The Times had been the most outspoken critic of the preparations of the Athens organizers. So severe was the criticism that the Greek government reportedly considered complaining officially to Rupert Murdoch, who owns the newspaper as part of his News International stable.
But The Times was not alone. Every newspaper in Britain and many in the United States had expressed skepticism about the Greeks’ ability to complete all the preparations in time.
As more than 10,000 accredited journalists began to gather in Athens for the start of the Olympics on Aug. 13, the tension was growing. But upon arriving, most people were in for a pleasant surprise. They landed at a state-of-the-art airport where friendly volunteers ushered them quickly and smoothly through the immigration and accreditation process.
It was a welcome relief to those journalists who had covered the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City two years earlier. There, in the wake of 9/11, the strict United States immigration process was followed to the absolute letter. Accreditation was conducted at a site downtown and was lengthy and bureaucratic, including in my case, for reasons I never established, a lengthy FBI check.
The accreditation tag is a piece of laminated plastic with your picture on it that everyone has to wear for the 17-day duration of the games. It is the journalist’s passport. If you do not have it around your neck, you are unable to enter the main media center and most of the venues used to stage the Olympic sports.
On top of the smooth accreditation process, most of the journalists in Athens were surprised by the security. If they had been reading the British and American press, they would have been expecting to find such poor security that a terrorist could have waltzed right in and blown the event to smithereens. Under heavy criticism for years for being lax on terrorism, Greece had pledged to provide the best security possible to create a safe environment for the Games and had spent an incredible 1 billion euros on keeping their promise. Authorities installed hundreds of cameras throughout the city, earning them criticism from some human rights groups. A surveillance blimp also patrolled the skies of Athens daily, becoming a familiar sight.
But, overall, while heightened security was evident, it was not oppressive. This was again in contrast to Salt Lake City where heavily armed sentry guards were located on nearly every street corner and gaining entry to the media center and venues became a wearying exercise.
To be fair to the American organizers, they had only had five months to react to the terrorist outrages in New York City and Washington, D.C., and dramatically amp up their security plans. The Greek government had nearly three years. Nevertheless, the security guards in Athens were usually far more pleasant and efficient than their American counterparts. Even at the busiest times of the day, journalists never had to wait more than a few minutes to gain entry to the venues.
The only occasion on which the Greeks were accused of overreacting during the Olympics was outside of the Hilton hotel. This expensively restored hotel served as the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee, the organization responsible for the awarding of the games to each host city. Besides the athletes’ village and the venues, it was the most heavily protected building in Athens during the games. Inside were approximately 120 pampered IOC members, including representatives of several European royal households, Arab sheiks and top government ministers from several African countries. Entry inside was limited strictly to those with the correct accreditation, and a pass inside was as coveted as a gold medal. Only a small selection of specially handpicked journalists were deemed worthy of one, arguably restricting the access of most of the media to those officials supposed to be the guardians of the Olympics.
So keen were the Greeks to keep the media out that a team of elite riot police was put on duty during the disciplinary hearing for the case of two Greek sprinters, Kostas Kederis and Ekaterina Thanou, who were accused of missing a series of drugs tests. At the end of the hearing, chaos ensued when the police indiscriminately attacked reporters, photographers, and cameramen with batons as they surged forward to hear the lawyer of Kederis and Thanou. It was a frightening glimpse into what might have happened if serious trouble had flared during the games.
The fear among many journalists in Athens was that this was a foretaste of what we might expect when the Olympic circus pitches its tent again in Beijing in 2008. The IOC’s decision in 2001 to award the games to Beijing was controversial because of the country’s human rights record. But Jacques Rogge, the Belgian surgeon who is president of the IOC, predicted that the Olympics will have a major impact on China’s social environment, including human rights. Both the Free Tibet campaign and the religious group Falun Gong have already started bombarding selected key Olympic journalists with press releases to gain publicity about their causes.
When Moscow staged the Olympics in 1980, the KGB were suspected of monitoring journalists’ telephone conversations and cutting them off if they tried to file stories criticizing the Soviet Union’s human rights record. Reporters who sent stories back via telex machines were left mystified when their copy arrived at their newspapers minus key paragraphs.
But China hopes the games will mark its arrival as a global influence, and with a sophisticated marketing campaign already well under way, it seems unlikely it would jeopardize that by deliberately mistreating international journalists.
Away from the so-called “Battle of the Hilton,” fear-mongering over security soon dissolved into a happy Olympic atmosphere where journalists were allowed to do their jobs unhindered. Yes, it was almost impossible to gain access to the athletes’ village, which on the outside resembled a fortress but inside was reportedly the best ever built for an Olympics. That left journalists relying on national Olympic committees or sponsors making their athletes available at specially arranged press conferences for those all-important quotes. But, then, that has been the case with all five games I have covered.
As compensation, journalists worked in the largest media center ever erected for any Olympic Games. It contained a range of facilities, from an Olympic library to a medical center to a 24-hour rooftop bar that, as you would expect, proved to be the most popular meeting point.
There was information in abundance, and it was all distributed by thousands of helpful bilingual volunteers.
It is ironic that everything people feared would happen in Athens actually had happened when Atlanta hosted the Olympics in 1996. There was a bombing despite the huge security operation, the buses did not run on time, the computer system did not function and the weather was oppressive. Greece, the smallest country to host the Olympics in 52 years and one of the poorest countries in the European Union, managed to outperform the world’s super power.
The biggest danger to journalists in Athens – particularly those who worked for British or U.S. publications – was when they stepped into the back of a cab and left themselves at the mercy of an angry driver who wanted to know why the world had ever doubted Athens.