They have, after all, spent $7 billion dollars putting on this show. And for what? To have their two most popular athletes, Kostas Kenteris and Ekaterini Thanou, paraded before the world as cheats. More than that, this sorry story was spread over five days and compounded by the athletes’ pathetic attempts to cover their tracks.
Discovering that your hero is a cheat is not easy but to then have to watch the refusal to accept responsibility, that takes deep disappointment into the land of downright humiliation.
The Greeks could have protested and wondered why their athletes were pursued by the International Olympics Committee; they could have asked why such scrutiny should have happened on the day before the formal opening of their Games.
No, they did nothing like that. They accepted that their athletes were in the wrong and deserved to be punished. The Games, they said, were bigger than two fallen heroes. It seemed they just wanted to move on. What kind of moving-on have they had? On Tuesday last the weightlifter Leonidas Sampanis became the first Greek to win a medal at the Athens Games; on Thursday it was announced he had failed a drug test.
Over the last two days, Greek television has shown endless footage of Sampanis leaving the arena, hugging his young son and then walking away in shame. You stump up $7 billion to prove that some of your country’s best-loved sports stars are actually frauds: it doesn’t seem like much of a deal.
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The achievement of the Greeks has been to see beyond the shaming of their biggest stars and to understand that the show is far bigger than the host nation.