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She's a power dresser. Big hair and raucous green minis. She's got a power marriage, a billionaire shipping magnate for a husband and more front than the Queen Mary. And that got her a power job, knocking up a little get together called the Olympic Games, in Athens in a few years time. Gianna Angelopoulos Daskalaki, she's got a power name that rolls on forever, she's just hoping the red tape and the headaches won't. Mark Corcoran on the bumpy road to 2004.

Announcement of 2004 Olympic winning bid

Samaranch: The city to organise the Olympic Games of the year 2004 is Athens.

00:00

Music

Corcoran: She won the bid for Athens But triumph soon turned to tragedy as she was promptly dumped by the Olympic Games team, forced to watch from the sidelines for three long years as preparations descended into chaos.

00:19

Samaranch

Samaranch: We are very much worried regarding what is going on in Athens.

00:36

Corcoran: For a while it looked like Greece would lose the Olympics.

Rogges: There is too much red tape and bureaucracy.

Gianna montage

Corcoran: But suddenly she was back. Gianna Angelopoulos Daskalaki, lawyer, former politician, wife of a billionaire shipping tycoon.

00:54

Kanelli

Kanelli: If she didn’t exist she should be invented.

01:04

Music

Gianna

Corcoran: Appointed Olympics boss, handed the task of salvaging Greek honour, in a society where honour can be more than life itself.

01:13

Kanelli: If we succeed, then she is going to be a hero. If we fail, then she is going to be a cursed person.

01:23

Gianna

Angelopoulos: There are people I don’t know and they don't know me but they feel that Gianna, or Gianna as they call me is a person they know very much and they just tell me, we are with you, we are all with you because this is for the good of our country.

01:31

Gianna carrying Olympic torch in Sydney

Corcoran: Gianna has convinced the International Olympic Committee that Athens can still carry the torch towards 2004. She also bears the burden of following Sydney, declared the best games ever. It's bound to be a tough, chaotic journey, but then chaos is a Greek word.

01:47

Map – Greece

Parthenon

Music

02:10

Corcoran: The Olympics are coming home to Greece, where the ancient games ran for a thousand years. But modern Athens has an image problem and from this vantage point, it's not hard to see why.

02:25

Athenian streets

Half the country's eleven million people are packed into this smog-bound, grid-locked sprawl that only an Athenian could love.

02:41

Music

Metro

Corcoran: One of the few good news stories to come out of Athens recently, the opening of the first stages of the metro, vital if this city is to have any chance of functioning during the Olympics.

02:54

Builders were forced to dig and scrape their way through thousands of years of civilisation, in the process they've transformed an engineering problem into a virtue. Stations now offer a stunning window to the past.

Music

Poster of Melina in Metro

Corcoran: And down among the relics, one very modern national treasure. The late, great Melina Mercouri – actress, activist, MP - a diva loved by the masses.

03:33

Archival footage -- Melina

Music

03:45

Corcoran: Since her death seven years ago, Greece hasn't seen another female figure like her, but now Melina has become the role model for another rising star.

Angelopoulos: I remember she was telling me, if you want you can do everything.

03:54

Gianna

Super:

Gianna Angelopoulos –Daskalaki

Athens 2004 President

So I'm glad I met her and we were together in the parliament and it seems that people they like people that they devote even their career and their fame for the good of the country.

04:10

Archival footage Melina

Corcoran: However, not everyone is happy with the Olympics boss comparing herself to Greece's cultural goddess.

04:27

Kanelli

Super:

Liana Kanelli

Communist MP

Kanelli: I think that she thought she could fill the emptiness she lacks in charm from Melina.

Kanelli walking into parliament

Corcoran: Liana Kanelli is hardly a friend. A journalist turned Communist Party member of parliament, she is ideologically opposed to Gianna who once served as a right-wing MP.

04:49

Kanelli

Kanelli: She has been a lawyer, she's been a deputy with the New Democracy Party, then she abandoned politics. She had a very successful marriage – what we call a star marriage – like other star types of politics or of the movies here and then she came back.

05:02

Gianna and husband at function

Music

05:22

Corcoran: Gianna married the husband from central casting, billionaire shipping magnate, Theodoros Angelopoulos. He helped to bankroll her successful Games bid and since Greece's socialist Prime Minister Costas Simitis invited Gianna back to rescue the Games, has also paid for her salary and support staff.

Kanelli

Kanelli: She's clever, she's tough and I've given her a nickname. I call her in Greek Halivaki because her husband has a steel industry so she's quite an iron lady.

05:48

Gianna and husband with Prime Minister

Music

06:01

Corcoran: But the Prime Minister's welcome goes only so far. Fearing Gianna's political ambitions he's resisted calls to create for her a single Olympics Super Ministry.

Stratigis

Stratigis: For her being the head of the organising committee is a stepping stone to a further political career perhaps but I don’t think the Olympics should be used as stepping stones.

06:19

Stratigis points to photos

This is still from the appointment …

06:32

Corcoran: Stratis Stratigis was the first Athens Games boss. He was sacked 18 months ago after an ideological falling out with the socialist government over his continued friendship with the exiled royal family of Greece.

Corcoran: And there of course is the famous …

06:50

Corcoran: He admits Gianna handled the bid brilliantly but claims she is now running the Olympics like a PR campaign.

06:57

Stratigis

Super:

Stratis Stratigis

Former Athens 2004 Chairman

Stratigis: She brought in her bid team who except for a couple of, two or three people, I think that they knew how, what Games, organising Games meant.

07:05

Marketing guys

Corcoran: At crucial meetings, Gianna is surrounded by this phalanx of media and marketing advisers and never far away a Washington PR firm she's hired to bolster her own image. They're all busy selling the vision of an Olympic city back on track, no further behind than Sydney was three years out.

07:22

Corcoran at stadium

Super:

Mark Corcoran

Corcoran: Well this is where the first Olympic Games of the modern era were held in 1896 and given the chaos and confusion surrounding the latest preparations, some of the more uncharitable critics are suggesting that the Games may end up back here in 2004. Not so says the Athens Organising Committee who point out that some 70 per cent of all sporting venues have been completed, the only problem is that, yes they were finished, but at the time when Athens won the bid, that was three and a half years ago; precious little has been done since.

37:45

Olympic venues

Music

08:20

Stadium

Corcoran: The main Olympic stadium was one of those big ticket items finished nearly four years ago. Now it's mainly used for football matches. Games organisers promised a facelift but today the workers are simply repairing the damage of a recent soccer riot.

08:28

Music

Gianna at stadium/getting into helicopter

Corcoran: Gianna arrives at the stadium complex, oblivious to the neglect. Her vision for 2004 is best from a safe height.

08:54

Corcoran: What do you hope to see today, on today's inspection?

Angelopoulos: I hope that we will see a lot. Actually what we expect to see. We cannot hide progress.

Stadium from air

Music

09:14

Corcoran: And from the air it does look very impressive, a vast Olympic realm of sporting complexes connecting freeways and the jewel in the crown, the new international airport.

09:26

Angelopoulos: Athens will be good for the Games, will be good for the athletes. We can provide them with a great games on a different scale, on a human scale.

09:39

Corcoran: But different departments control different projects. The airport built by a German-led consortium, is slated to open on March 1, but it's useless without a freeway connecting it to the city and that is someone else's problem.

09:46

Construction site

It's a Sunday and the airport construction crews are working round the clock to meet the deadline. At the freeway site managed by a Greek consortium and supervised by yet another department is all but deserted save for a few Albanian guest workers.

10:06

Albanian workers

Corcoran: So where are all the Greeks?

10:25

Albanian man 1: Ah… they would be here, but it is Sunday – they don't need to work.

Albanian man 2: The Greeks sleep and bouzouki… they've got enough money.

Excerpt from 'Never on Sunday'

Super at top of screen:

'Never on Sunday'

Corcoran: Never on Sunday maybe the refrain of Greek construction workers but it remains forever Melina Mercouri's defining film role. It was among other things a light-hearted tribute to the Greek work ethic.

10:39

Melina: If you weren't a slave you'd come in.

Corcoran: Apparently this laid back approach to life is still treated as a kind of duty statement by a Greek bureaucracy that defeated one Olympics boss and exasperates another.

11:08

Stratigis

Super:

Stratis Stratigis

Former Athens 2004 Chairman

Stratigis: Some of them wanted to work the Greek way which is not working hard enough and not being international enough.

11:22

Gianna

Super:

Gianna Angelopoulos –Daskalaki

Athens 2004 President

Angelopoulos: You know for Greece it is also a unique challenge because if we override that, it means that we change a tradition, let's say a less successful tradition that was here installed for years, for ages.

11:30

Road/construction signs

Music

11:41

Corcoran: To experience the Greek bureaucracy in action you need travel no further than the site of the Olympic village. Keen to show progress, signs and fences have been thrown up and the graders sent in.

Olga walks though gate

The only problem is no one bothered to resolve compensation problems with land-holders. So the graders work around the mod of confused sheep and angry locals.

12:04

Olga and Toula

Staring down the bulldozers is Olga, supported by her good friend Toula. Olga was left with a 100 per cent disability after a car accident that claimed the life of her husband.

12:18

Man: Excuse me, lady… the supervisor would like to talk to you.

12:34

Corcoran: At this point, the men from the Olympics arrive. The meeting gets off to a bad start. Olga is accused of faking her disability.

Man: I only asked… before, I saw her walking and I asked "Why are you on crutches today?"

Toula: If only you could see all the plastic that she's got inside her.

Man: Look! Explain to him that this are has been expropriated, and compensation paid, and within the area it is this house and two or three other houses.

12:51

Corcoran: Olga says they offered only a third of a house's value making it impossible to buy another home in Athens.

13:11

Olga: I'm going mad!

Toula: She only want shelter.

Man: I'm only the contractor… Tell him!

Toula: She doesn't ask for money – only a house. The people who run the Public Housing should put her in a house with her two little orphans – she doesn't want anything else.

13:19

Olga gets into car

Corcoran: Finally Olga is forced to go and stay with her brother. Penniless she is unable to resolve the problem the traditional Greek way. A brown paper envelope or fakalaki.

13:40

Corcoran: What is fakalaki?

Stratigis: Fakalaki is money under the table for doing things.

Stratigis

Corcoran: But it is, it is accepted as being common within Greek government and business circles fakalaki, why isn't it, how have you been able to isolate the Olympics?

14:00

Stratigis: Because that is the only way that the Olympics would happen, by having, by having something which wouldn't run the Greek way.

14:12

November 17 Demonstration

Chant: Simitis Government – lackeys of NATO! Greece is not a colony!

14:20

Corcoran: The Greek way isn't always so comical. When it comes to politics in this deeply polarised country, it can lead to bloodshed. On the 17^th November every year leftists groups march on the American Embassy in Athens. They commemorate students who died opposing a US-backed military junta that ruled Greece some three decades ago. Among the protestors, members of the prime minister's own political party and the armed forces.

Chant: Murderers of all peoples – Americans!

15:07

Corcoran: This is the Greece you don’t see in the tourist brochures. Thousands of riot police ring the US compound, embassy of the nation that will send the largest team to the Athens Games.

15:15

Corcoran: Fighting breaks out between various groups, luckily no one is killed and the police proudly proclaim this to be the quietest march in years. But the 17^th November also spawned an extreme left-wing terrorist group that has operated with impunity here for 25 years. In all that time, Greek police have failed to make a single arrest and that's what really worries Olympic security planners.

15:45

Bombed car/Saunders assassination

The latest target was British military attache Stephen Saunders, gunned down in the Athens traffic last June. After the earlier murders of several American officials the US government demanded extraordinary action. The result, a special pact that will see Athens flooded with American security agents during the Olympics.

16:25

Gianna

Corcoran: Would the Games have been possible without the involvement of American security? Would they have been able to go ahead?

16:53

Angelopoulos: You know this contract doesn't say anything about the Olympic Games, it's a kind of assistance having to do with the organisation of security in Greece and for Greece, but of course because of the Olympic Games, the Olympic Games will be, will take advantage of this kind of preparation.

16:58

Athens

Music

17:21

Corcoran: Games organisers insist there is no suggestion of 17 November disrupting the Olympics. It's a position that is now contradicted by a former Games boss, who reveals for the first time that he was the target of 17 November threats.

17:28

Stratigis

Stratigis: Yes, well actually I received a couple of threats when I was chairing and they suggested I should get an armoured vehicle and a guard and I said, I would become much more conspicuous because if they want to gun me down they will gun me down even if I have the best of protection.

17:47

Corcoran: When he left the post, the threats stopped. With Gianna personal security has always been an issue, ever since the terrorist group gunned down industrialist Dimitrios Angelopoulos back in 1986.

18:10

Gianna

Corcoran: Your husband's uncle of course was murdered by the November 17 movement, you don’t feel there is a connection there that you may become a target due to your, both your family connections and the current position you hold?

18:30

Angelopoulos: That is a very private issue, you know, concerning my family. I don’t want to speak about that.

18:43

Stratigis

Stratigis: She might, she might be a target, there is no doubt about that because when we've seen various targets especially – they change from time to time the targets of that particular terrorist organisation. Anyway she should take care of herself.

18:48

Bomb outside Kanelli's office

Corcoran: 17 November gets the headlines. But in Greece political extremists of all persuasions often resort to violence. Two days after our interview, the office of Communist MP, Liana Kanelli is damaged by a powerful gas cylinder bomb, her staff late for work, narrowly escape injury.

19:15

Kanelli

Kanelli: It was meant to kill. It was meant to give some blood.

19:45

Corcoran: Not a good start is it?

Kanelli: No, it's a very bad start and for the first time in my life I'm not as optimistic as I used to be. I'm worried.

IOC meeting

Rogges: We are now 1358 days away from August 13 2004.

19:59

Corcoran: Across town just one hour later, Gianna is winding up another successful meeting with IOC deputy, Jacque Rogges.

Rogges: I would hate if I would leave Athens and leaving you relaxed. I want you to be scared until the last day of the Olympic Games, until the closing ceremony…

Corcoran: News of yet another bombing couldn't have come at a worst time. But there is very little sympathy from Gianna for the intended target, Liana Kanelli.

Gianna at press conference

Angelopoulos: Nobody can connect that to the Olympic Games, that is a very small explosion of gas that people they say that has more to do with personal problems and nothing to do with the Olympics. Thank you.

20:38

IOC Delegation

Corcoran: The IOC delegation heads for home with the Greeks insisting that this is the safest city in Europe. They're on the road to 2004 with the iron lady of Athens and in true Greek style it looks like being an eventful ride.

20:57

Athens at night

Music

21:16

Restaurant

Corcoran: Ten PM on any night and only now are Athenians coming out to play. They'll be late for work tomorrow but it's the Greek way. Things always get done in the end, why should the Olympics be any different?

21:37

Music

Corcoran: Forget about the officials they say, the Games will be saved by ordinary Greeks doing things the Greek way.

Music

Kanelli: In this mess, in this typical Greek chaos, we are going to save you, everybody who is coming here. You are going to have traffic problems, going to be a jam, a hell of a situation

22:10

Kanelli

and then a Greek comes and says, I have a motorbike, you are not going to lose the game, I'm going to find a small street just behind the stadium and I'm going to get you there on time.

22:21

Music

Credits:

Reporter Mark Corcoran

Camera Geoff Clegg

Sound Kate Graham

Editor Garth Thomas

Research Vivien Altman