The Athens Olympics: Optimistic Legacies – Post-Olympic Assets and the Struggle for their Realization

The 2004 Athens Olympic Games provided the host city with an excellent opportunity to present itself globally as a modern, well designed and well run metropolis with modern facilities and infrastructure symbolic of quality of life and economic investment. The way, however, that the huge, expensive facilities, which were bequeathed to Greek society in general and the host city in particular, were to be used and exploited after the Games, became a splitting headache to the government which experienced harsh criticism from all the political parties. Nevertheless, ambitious plans for the use and exploitation of the post-Olympic legacy of sports facilities and assets as public resources were put into practice with slow but unfaltering steps.