Great was the euphoria for the Olympic Games in Athens, great was the disappointment for the bankruptcy that followed. A comment by Yiannis Papadimitriou, 20 years later.

20 years have passed since the most enjoyable sporting spectacle I have experienced so far. I saw the “official favorite”, the Greek national basketball team, beat Australia by almost 20 points. And right after that, on the same field, Puerto Rico celebrated a historic victory against the American dream team, which of course that year did not resemble a dream, not even a dream.

All this happened at the Olympic Games in Athens. In my memory they remain indelible and unrepeatable or at least unusual. But other unusual things happened that summer. Such a small country, like Greece, carried out the most demanding organizational bet that he could take on, with hard work, but also a disarming smile.

We saw the right professionals active in the right positions, with the main criterion being what they know and not who they know. We saw a huge and adorable community of volunteers. We saw gleaming subway lines, spotless buses, brand new taxis, renovated hospitals, freshly painted facades, car-free LEAs.

In addition, the Olympic Games were an occasion to complete unique infrastructure projects such as the Athens metro, Attiki Odos and the “Eleftherios Venizelos” airport. Without the Games, we would probably make the same bitter puns that the people of Thessaloniki do today about their own infrastructure projects (“Athens’ metro is good, but Thessaloniki’s doesn’t exist…”)

Persistent, but simplistic theory

Only a little later we received the bill, which we are paying to this day. Or at least that’s what many think. But are they right?

The narrative that Greece was driven into bankruptcy because of the Olympics it is too persistent to ignore. But it is also too simplistic to believe. We all know of course that the Olympics took place in 2004 and the bankruptcy happened just five years later. But that doesn’t prove anything. It is a classic thinking error to assume that when an event A is preceded in time by an event B, then B is a consequence of A. It may be so, but it may not be (usually it is not). Causation must be specifically proven.

Especially if we consider the following: the country has gone bankrupt three more times to date without having organized an Olympic Games. It almost went bankrupt again in 1990 despite absorbing 6% of EU funds in the previous decade, representing just 3.5% of the EU population. And the cost of the Games may have amounted to 9.2 billion euros (as estimated by a relevant IOBE study), but in the “fatal” 2009, OSE alone had accumulated losses of more than 10 billion euros. It should be noted that we are talking about the largest real estate owner in all of Greece…