In 2004 Greece hosted the Olympic games, while the buildings were just in time completed the expenses rose above budget, even more when just a couple of days before the opening ceremony a plastic bomb package was discovered. Because of this they had to secure the games by installing 70.000 police officers.
Now almost 8 years later I visited the Athens Olympic Stadium complex to see how Greece maintain this costly investment. I expected to visit a place with beauty and pride because of the bond between Greece and the Olympics, but during my visit I got more disappointed then I would have expected to be. The place isn’t well maintained and you can see that nature is trying to get back the land. While wondering around I came across the swimming area of the complex, where it all looked abandoned. You could tell by using the wood for the tribunes that or it should has been build in a rush or they wanted to lower the building cost. Anyway after 8 years you start to see how unsafe this is, and how Greece nowadays is struggling to maintain its property. The interesting thing is that Greece has lost it course to prosperity while having this huge history from which the whole world of today is created. Which in it’s turn has an effect that those times can never be reached again anyway…