Lefteris Stefanoudakis, a big name in Greek weightlifting in the 1970s who competed at the Munich and Montreal Olympics, would love to have been a part of the Games in Athens, but is happy to have put the daily hardships behind him. high competition.
Training for up to 12 hours a day brought its rewards, including a gold medal at the Mediterranean Championships and several national records. But he also came with the constant threat of injury, always watching his diet and frequent trips to the sauna before an event to make his weight class, that was before he had even stepped on the podium. And that’s not all.
“Sport is as much about the power of the mind as it is about the power of the body,” says Lefteris, a stocky character who looks good for his 54 years and still works out “for fun.” “During a lift I was concentrating so hard you could have put a nail in my arm and I wouldn’t have felt a thing.” And judging by the facial expressions in his faded black-and-white competition photos on the walls of his small office that show him in various vein-popping poses, I can believe it.
That mental stress is sure to be even greater for Greek athletes this summer, given the high expectations of the home crowd, says Lefteris.
“The Greeks will be under huge pressure to perform. Having said that, everyone seems to be under pressure to succeed these days due to the reliance on sponsorship. When we went to the Olympics we had a huge sense of accomplishment because we had paid for everything. ourselves: our kit and equipment and travel expenses to events.
And although Lefteris returned home without a medal, he was happy to bask in the simple honor of leading the parade of athletes during the opening ceremony.
“I couldn’t believe it when the Greek team was asked to lead the athletes around the stadium due to our country’s Olympic heritage,” Lefteris said. “It was an emotional moment because Greece is such a small country and we were ahead of the United States and the Soviet Union. It was one of the proudest moments of my career.”
“It was great to be among so many like-minded people from all over the world, especially for me who comes from a small town in Crete. Everyone was smiling and hugging and we even exchanged little gifts.
“I remember in Montreal, there were crowds of fans outside the stadium waiting to invite us to their homes for a meal,” he says. “Unfortunately, that kind of thing is unlikely to happen this time due to the terrorist threat. Security will be so tight that I doubt any of the athletes will get a chance to see the real Greece.”
Of course, terrorism is not a modern phenomenon and the murder of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich after an Arab group calling itself Black September stormed the Olympic Village and took them hostage shocked the world. He also left his mark on Lefteris.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I turned on the television,” he says. “The day before we were on a bus with the Israeli weightlifters coming back from training. We were chatting with them about their progress, then they got off the bus and said goodbye. We never saw them again. That was the worst moment of my career. And it forced me to put a lot of things into perspective.
It may have explained his disappointing 18th place overall. But the tragedy seemed to bring people closer together, forcing them to forget their differences instead of putting up barriers. It also sparked Lefteris’s close friendship with a German security guard, whose father had been among the occupation forces in his hometown of Polemarhi, west of Hania.
“Every day we would go to the athletes’ restaurant, where a security guard would check our ID cards at the door,” says Lefteris. “One day this guard, seeing that I was Greek, asked me where I was from. When I told him I was from Crete, he was interested to know where exactly because his father had served there during World War II. And when I told him he , it turned out that his father used to show films in my father’s kafenion.
“So we hugged and became good friends. But that didn’t stop him from sending me back to my room the next day when I forgot my pass. I respected him for that, especially after what had happened with the Israelis.”
A year after disappointing results in Montreal, Lefteris stepped down to focus on helping the next generation of Greek weightlifters. Always aware of the support he had received when he was young, he wanted to return his sport in kind.
For him, it had all started at the age of 13, after a football match at the Hania stadium, about 100 meters from his Stefan Athlitika sports shop, when he was transfixed by a room full of muscular weightlifters They worked on one side. room.
“I said to myself, ‘I can do that,’ and after speaking my way up, I proved it by lifting 120 pounds,” says Lefteris. “They asked me to join them in Athens the following week at the junior championships, which I did and achieved the Greek record.”
From there he was hooked, even making his own weights with cement. But he believes the Olympics are likely to be a huge missed opportunity to ensure Greece’s future stars never have to skimp on equipment like he had to.
“Sport should be promoted in schools because the education it provides is more than just physical,” adds Lefteris. “However, I am afraid that after the Olympics the country will not have the money to take advantage of any surge in interest. It seems that the Olympics these days are more about tourism than sport.”
So Lefteris has no intention of boosting Athens’ tourist economy this summer. He intends to follow the fate of today’s Greek weightlifting heroes Pyrros Dimas and Kakhi Kakiasvilis, who are bidding for their fourth Olympic gold medal, from the giant television screen in his tent. Drop by if you’re just passing through, if only to make sure that even in Hania, the Olympic spirit is still very much alive.
1896 AND ALL THAT...
Ten things you didn’t know about the last Olympic Games in Athens.
1. The First Modern Olympiad opened in Athens on April 6, but only after a wealthy local architect donated a million drachmas to restore the 330 BC Panathenaic Stadium. C. when the Greek government could not finance a new one.
2. The 245 competitors, more than half of them Greek and all men since women were not allowed to compete, came from just 14 countries. The first Olympic champion in more than 1,500 years was American James Connolly, who won the triple jump.
3. The winners received a SILVER medal and an olive wreath, while the runners-up received bronze medals and a laurel wreath. Competitors in third place received nothing.
4. The athletes competed as individuals and not for their country. And some, like Oxford student John Boland, went to Greece as spectators and came back as Olympic tennis champions, despite playing in ordinary leather-soled shoes.
5. German athlete Carl Schumann kept busy. His gymnastic efforts earned him victories in the individual horse vault, as well as the horizontal bar and parallel bar team events. But although he missed out on medals in the long jump, triple jump, shot put and weightlifting, he took first prize in Greco-Roman wrestling.
6. Greek shepherd Spyridon Louis won the marathon, beating his 16 fellow competitors by more than seven minutes in shoes given to him by his neighbors. In addition to his medal and olive wreath, he also earned free meals at an Athens restaurant and free shaves from a patriotic barber until his death in 1940.
7. Britain’s Launceston Elliott won two powerlifting medals, placing first in the one-handed lift at 71kg and second in the two-handed lift at 111.5kg.
8. In the rope climb, Greek Nikos Andriakopoulos took first place after being the only person to reach the top of the rope, which was no surprise as the competitors could only use their hands and had to leave the legs extended.
9. In 1896 there were no worries about the Olympic pool, because there was none. The swimmers were thrown into the sea in temperatures of 13 degrees C off the port of Piraeus and had to make it to shore. Hungarian Alfred Hajos, who despite winning the 100 and 1,200 meter freestyle, said afterwards that during the races he was more interested in staying alive than in the desire to win.
10. Eight of the ten competitors in the 100 km track cycling event did not complete the required 300 laps after complaining of dizziness.