Posted on 11/06/2004 9:43:47 PM PST by Destro
I guess the idiot is the person who never heard of Hesiod. Standard classical history 101.
The inflated euro sure isn't helping their situation there. They totally mishandled the Olympics and didn't do a whole lot to garner my sympathy.
The Olympics in Greece were the most expensive ever but also one of the best (even got better ratings for NBC).
That would explain why the stadiums were half empty, or worse, for many events and they were giving tickets away. I'm beginning to see you problem. Here in America we wouldn't consider that a success.
They never gave tickets away - and the sales were on par with Barcelona. The seats that were empty were for sports mostly Americans watch.
Granted, I didn't watch the man's tag team goat rope. Were the stands crowded there?
ATHENS — We owe them an apology, oh yes we do. The Greeks pulled off the Olympic Games after we said they did not have a prayer, and now there's but one way to make it right:
Give them another shot.
The Summer Games belong here, in the Olympic cradle, and just one pilgrimage to Ancient Olympia would tell you that. Zeus doesn't play Paris or Moscow, London or Times Square. This is the gods' homecourt. It shouldn't go abandoned for the next 108 years.
Not this time around...he played to an empty house in Greece.
Ticket sales finally reach 3.4 million goal
"Olympic officials insisted today they were happy with ticket sales despite masses of empty seats at many venues.
However, they said they could not control corporate sponsors who may have bought tickets and distributed them only for recipients not to turn up.
Marton Simitsek, Olympic chief of operations, said: "We have reached our goal. We are going to have 3.5m tickets sold by the end of the Games.
"We're very happy. In many sports we have sold 100% of our capacity."
According to Simitsek, 3,285,000 tickets have been sold, eclipsing the 2.7m sold for the Games in Seoul in 1988 and the 3.21m sold for Barcelona in 1992."
I guess the stands were full of invisible Greeks. Then of course there's the massive failure to pay for the games. Did the invisible Greeks use invisible Euros to pay?
You should change your name to Retsina, it's a Greek wine more people are familiar with.
Greeks sold their target tickets. They are not obligated to watch useless sports some Americans and Canadians are into just for the sake of making the seats look good on TV. All is explained in the links. Reading is fun.
We need to get really worked up about these things and have bunches of hissy fits.
So they intended to end up with a huge deficit. Poor planning.
War on terror made them have to spend extra on security. In any case what does that have to do with Greece's historical primacy of its legacy?
Yes, there was that sudden need that was only know a couple of YEARS before the games.
Any nation has to some claims to the neighbouring territory, especially in such old, burdened with historical arguments and generally messy regions as the Balkans.
But how a different name (not even TOO different) would fetch the real territory for a tiny and powerless statelet? It is a ridiculous assumption, like fighting a straw man.
As to the claims to history, what, Macedonian Slavs have ever proclaimed themselves Greeks?! Quite the opposite, methinks. And everybody knows that Philip and Alexander WERE Greeks, so what's the problem?
Maybe Bulgarians are the only people having some real beef against (Slav) Macedonians' history grab, judging by Destro's quotes. But even if it's true, so what? Is there any possibility that they'll go to war for that?
Someone told here that Bulgarians and Macedonians have no shared blood, only the language... how was this figured out? It looks like intermarriage and "war-time interbreeding" had made the population of these lands DNA indistinguishable very long time ago.
People have gone to war for less.
Remember the British/Argentina war over the Falklands? It started with Argentina calling the islands "Malvinas".
BTW: just for fun, a new rumor (emphasis on the word rumor) from Greek Sat. Television is that the state department made the decision to go ahead as a reward for Albanian US citizens' support for KERRY. The report ALLEGED (remember this is rumor just for fun here) that the decision was made shortly after the first exit polls were comming out.
(BTWW: This tracks with Kerry's people making phone calls to lobyists advising that $100,000.00 would forgive any political sins as a result of the early exit polls.)
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