y Natalie Weeks
Aug. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Greek athletes may have to abandon
training and start looking for jobs as the financial crisis
slashes sports funding in the birthplace of the Olympics.
“Athletes are being forced to stop because they can’t get
by financially,” said Stella Lazarou Tigka, the president of
the Vouliagmeni Nautical Association, a sports club in a seaside
resort south of Athens. Eight of its members were on the 13-
strong national women’s water polo team that won the gold medal
last week at the FINA World Championships in Shanghai.
Greece can no longer afford to support athletes while they
train. With the country in its third year of recession, state
spending on sports has been slashed. Funds to the Greek Olympic
Committee for 2009-2012 were cut to 8 million euros ($11.3
million) from 30 million euros in the previous four years,
Hellenic Olympics Committee President Spyros Capralos said.
Austerity measures pledged by the government in exchange
for a 110 billion-euro May 2010 bailout plan from the European
Union and International Monetary Fund may make matters worse.
Beyond hurting the competitiveness of its athletes at the 2012
Olympic Games in London, the biggest economic upheaval in a
generation may put Greece decades behind as discretionary
spending on activities such as sports is deemed not a priority.
“It’s an easy option; sports or culture are usually the
ones that have their budgets cuts,” said Alan Seymour, a
professor at the University of Northampton in the U.K. “People
may get a negative perspective on extra funding to elite
sports.”

Seeds Sown

Greece spent more than 11 billion euros to host the Olympic
Games of 2004 -- double its initial budget -- building gleaming
stadiums and sports arenas at more than a dozen sites and sowing
the seeds of the current financial crisis. Its budget deficit
widened to a euro-area record for the time of 7.5 percent of
gross domestic product.
The current austerity measures are aimed at scaling back
the budget gap to 1.1 percent of GDP in 2015 from 10.5 percent
last year. With unemployment set to average 14.5 percent this
year, austerity measures prompted violent protests in Athens.
The GDP, which contracted 4.4 percent in 2010, will shrink
a further 3.8 percent this year, according to a report from EU
and IMF inspectors in July. The nation’s debt load will peak at
161 percent of GDP next year. It’s already the biggest in the
euro region’s history.
“This is a time of unprecedented fiscal effort and we have
to cut funding all around,” Prime Minister George Papandreou
told his Cabinet on July 26.

Feeling the Pain

Funding to athletic federations was cut 24 percent from
2009 to 40.4 million euros in 2011, the budget of the Culture
and Tourism Ministry’s General Secretariat for Sport shows.
“State funding is down but in the situation the country is
in, it would be provocative for it not to be,” said Antonios
Dimitrakopoulos, president of the Hellenic Sailing Federation.
Greece called off hosting the 2013 Athens Deaflympics and
the multisport Volos Mediterranean Games in the port city north
of the capital for a lack of funds. Some athletic groups have
shut down, unable to cover operating costs.
The Vouliagmeni association founded in 1937 by local
sportsmen in the eponymous seaside town is beginning to feel the
pain. Its open swimming center, for instance, costs 200,000
euros a year to maintain. The association has to also spend on
travel and training for its champions. Many athletes train for
six to seven hours a day, including weekends, requiring the club
to cover their living expenses. It has done that through
membership fees and state aid. Such grants are now all but gone.

‘Abuses’

“Last year, we lowered the budget and it is imperative
that we keep cutting,” Lazarou Tigka said. “Reducing stipends
to athletes and cutting personnel have been among the cuts. When
athletes are forced to stop because they can’t get by, they will
have to change direction, find a different job.”
Dependence on the state for jobs, pensions and social
benefits has come to symbolize Greece’s ailing finances.
Athletes were often given public sector jobs to support their
training. Much of the spending on sports has been inefficient,
says Panos Bitsaksis, general secretary for Sport.
“We need to examine the piles of money given to Greek sport
in the past and if it had the result it should have,” he said.
“Many athletes received salaries for positions they weren’t
filling. There was abuse of privileges by athletes who were no
longer active.”

Olympic Bid

Many of the 22 athletic halls built on the 15 Olympic sites
for the 2004 Athens Games remain largely unused. Olympic
Properties SA, the state-run agency that manages the venues
built for the Olympics, is unprofitable. Multiple plans on using
the venues to raise money have failed.
Culture and Tourism Minister Pavlos Yeroulanos told
lawmakers in July last year that he’s pushing for a body that
can document, plan, advise and regulate sports efficiently. When
he took over the ministry in 2009, the same amounts could be
allocated to sports Greece excels in, such as Marathons, and
ones where it doesn’t, such as ice hockey, he said.
“We inherited huge problems,” he said. “The country
would commit to an event which it hadn’t cleared funds for from
the finance ministry in order to be able to host it.”
The Olympic Committee’s Capralos says athletes who qualify
for the 2012 Greek delegation will participate.
“Preparation for the Olympics depends on finances,” he
said. “When you don’t have enough money to send athletes to
international events or training centers to prepare in the best
possible way, of course it affects their performance.”

Not Eroded

Greece won two silver Olympic medals and two bronze ones at
the 2008 Beijing Olympics. That compares with 16 in Athens in
2004 -- including six gold medals -- the second-highest since it
hosted the first modern Olympic Games in the Panathenaic Stadium
in 1896, winning 46 medals including 10 gold ones.
“Going back in time, all the things Olympia in Greece
represents will never be eroded,” University of Northampton’s
Seymour said. “History and tradition won’t just be dismissed at
the press of a button because of its economic difficulties, but
it’s just something they will have to wrestle with.”