‘Gianna’: Greek for ‘Believe’

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — The venues aren’t finished and security is a worry, yet many Olympic officials and others say they have confidence that this summer’s Athens Games will be fine, maybe memorable, possibly even great.

How can this be?

One name: Gianna.

That is Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, the 48-year-old head of the Athens 2004 organizing committee. An impeccably dressed, cigar-smoking, self-described perfectionist, she is emblematic of the Greece that officials want to showcase: a technically adept, thoroughly modern nation that is the equal of any in Europe.

“You have to have the courage to face the unexpected,” Angelopoulos-Daskalaki said in a recent interview in her Athens office. “This is the difference between people who do things and people who don’t dare, who don’t dare to live.”

Angelopoulos-Daskalaki headed the successful 1997 bid for the Games, then left the Olympic scene. Three years later, the International Olympic Committee, realizing that little in Athens had gotten done, demanded change.

Angelopoulos-Daskalaki was promptly brought back, and now the race is on to see if Greece, whose population of 11 million makes it the smallest host nation of a Summer Games since Finland in 1952, can get ready for an Olympics in four years instead of seven.

Athens organizers are due here today to make their final formal pre-Games report to the International Olympic Committee’s ruling executive board.

Doubters around the world may voice concern. But in Olympic precincts and in Greece, where she is so well-known she typically goes by first name only, the smart money is still on Gianna, dubbed Man of the Year by the Greek-language Esquire magazine. She appeared on its January 2003 cover dressed in a tuxedo and holding a cigar.

“She is very demanding. So am I. She is patient. So am I,” said IOC President Jacques Rogge of Belgium. “We have different styles, of course, but you know, I can see in her the same drive I see in myself.”

Alexander Kitroeff, a Haverford College professor whose recent book, “Wrestling with the Ancients,” explores the links between modern Greek identity and the Olympics, said Angelopoulos-Daskalaki operates with a “confident dynamism.”

He said she is likely to need every bit of it to convince the nonbelievers: “Greece has the history. It wants to show it has the modernity, the capability, the sophistication.”

The only sign that Angelopoulos-Daskalaki might be feeling any stress is the Cuban cigars; she’s now up to two or three a day, though she vows to cut back to one after the Games.

“I have never been an actor but I can imagine how they feel in theaters, how they have to feel every night and go and give a performance,” she said. “This is a real-life performance. There are no falls, no errors, no excuses.”

She has long been aware that the Games will brand Greece, good or bad, for years to come. “It will not be easy,” she said in a speech at Harvard in 1998. “Many said that of the bid itself. But in the new Greece, we aim high and seek to achieve what others say is impossible.”

She heard similar motivational messages during her childhood on the Greek island of Crete, where her father, Frixos Daskalaki, ran a small business and she learned English, French and the piano.

“My father in his way influenced me and my sister to educate ourselves and to try to do things in life,” she said.

He dreamed that she would become an archeologist, but she recalled telling him, “I want to be more active.” So she became a lawyer, then a politician, winning election in 1986 to the Athens Municipal Council and in 1989 to Parliament.

The following year she married Theodore Angelopoulos, one of Greece’s wealthiest men. She resigned her seat in Parliament and devoted herself to the family shipping business.

When she tells the story of their wedding, her voice goes soft. He had told her he wanted to marry, but he had to go out of town for six days. If she also wanted to get married, he told her, she should meet him when he got back, at the church near where he was born. She was told to invite his parents and hers, and no one else, and to organize all the other details. She met him at the church on July 26, 1990.

They are raising a daughter and two sons. “The truth is that we are real partners in life,” she said.

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Many in Greece believed Athens was entitled to serve as host of the 1996 Games, which marked the 100th anniversary of the first modern Games, also held in Athens. But Atlanta won out, and it became clear to Angelopoulos-Daskalaki that while history matters, today’s Olympics demand more.

So the campaign for 2004 accented Greece’s technical competence and modern infrastructure, with promises of a new airport, highways and rail lines to complement Greece’s ancient Olympic heritage.

Athens was selected in September 1997, beating out finalist Rome, plus Cape Town, Stockholm and Buenos Aires. Angelopoulos-Daskalaki said the winning bid disproved “the notorious Greek paradox” that Greeks “only succeed well as individuals but rarely as a team.”

By spring 2000, however, with little progress evident, the IOC stepped in.

“They lost two years and a half where nothing was in operation and nothing was done, no construction, nothing,” said Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, then the IOC president. “I know very well Gianna. Gianna is a first-class woman. To have her as the president of the organizing committee was the solution. Since then things are going much better.”

One of her aides describes Angelopoulos-Daskalaki as “a manager, a fixer, an advocate, a negotiator and the face of the Olympic Games, all rolled up into one.” She can be found hectoring sluggish bureaucrats one minute, wooing corporate sponsors the next. She is said to be in constant communication with Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis.

Angelopoulos-Daskalaki works late and expects the same of her aides. A day off? Not likely until after the Games. She has been known to raise her voice and slam down the phone.

Her aides, however, typically describe her with admiration, even affection. They say the yelling isn’t personal, it’s just one way she connotes the importance of a particular matter.

“People come to my office and they refer to [some] problem,” she said. “I say come back with a solution.”

Michael Knight, who headed the Sydney 2000 organizing committee, said, “Because of the different structure between Australia and Greece, Gianna has had to operate with a lot less formal power than I had in Sydney. She’s had to make the difference by sheer force of personality.”

Angelopoulos-Daskalaki has also sought to put her personal imprimatur on the Games, operating on the belief that they should be rooted in Olympic culture. So for the first time, the torch relay will touch all five continents represented by the Olympic rings.

The medals will bear a new design for the first time since 1928, depicting the goddess Nike standing with wings outspread, as well as a stadium that looks like the Panathinaikon in Athens, home of the 1896 Games. The stadium on the old medals looked suspiciously like the Colosseum in Rome, Greek organizers say.

And the men’s and women’s shotput will be contested at ancient Olympia, site of the competitions that began in 776 B.C., about a four-hour drive from Athens.

The tradition-minded IOC had to sign off on all of these changes. The shotput initiative also required cooperation from the Greek government, various historical and archeological interests and the international track and field federation.

“It was not an easy struggle,” said Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports, the U.S. Games broadcaster. “She marshaled all the forces together and pulled it off when not a lot of people were jumping up and down about it.”

Though the Greek government is in charge of Olympic construction, Angelopoulos-Daskalaki played a pivotal role in advancing certain projects, most prominently the rowing venue at Schinias, a project aimed at reclaiming an environmental disaster.

“Someone had to push,” said Denis Oswald, the chief IOC inspector for the Athens Games and head of the international rowing federation. “She pushed. We pushed.”

Will the pushing be enough? The Games begin Aug. 13. Only 15 of the 39 venues are finished, though the rest are nearing completion, according to a report delivered last week at a U.S. Olympic Committee conference in New York.

The primary construction worry now is the roof over Olympic stadium, projected to be the architectural signature of the Games. The arches started moving into place last week.

“The remaining time should be enough to finish all construction,” Oswald said Monday.

At the same time, Olympic-related cost overruns are likely to add at least $1 billion to projected capital costs of $5.4 billion. Security costs are now estimated at $1.2 billion.

It is in this environment that Angelopoulos-Daskalaki has been asked to rally the Athens 2004 team.

“Come to Greece to watch a proud country,” she said. “A country that [exceeded] an expectation, a low expectation, that they could not do it -- and they did it. This is how they will feel the day after the Games.”

And if the Games do turn out fine, maybe memorable, perhaps great, Angelopoulos-Daskalaki said, “We have to define another word for ‘miracle.’

“Maybe after the Games we will have to prepare a new dictionary for what Greeks have done for their country during the last seven years.”

She paused, then said, “Four years, actually, yes.”