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 Athens Games, but is happy to have left the daily struggles of life 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 onto the podium. And that’s not all.
“Sports is as much about the power of the mind as it is about the power of the body,” says Lefteris, a burly 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 driven a nail into 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 will surely be even greater for the Greek athletes this summer, given the high expectations of the home crowd, says Lefteris.
“The Greeks will be under great pressure to perform. Having said that, everyone seems to be under pressure to succeed these days because of the dependency on sponsorship. When we went to the Olympics we had a great sense of accomplishment because we had paid for everything. ourselves: our kit and equipment and travel expenses to the events”.
And although Lefteris returned home without a medal, he was happy to enjoy 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 guide the athletes around the stadium because of 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, coming from a small town in Crete. Everyone was smiling and hugging each other and we even exchanged small gifts.
“I remember in Montreal, there were crowds of fans outside the stadium waiting to invite us to their homes for lunch,” he says. “Unfortunately, that sort of thing is unlikely to happen this time because of 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 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 overall. But the tragedy seemed to bring people closer, forcing them to forget their differences rather than put up barriers. It also sparked Lefteris’s close friendship with a German security guard, whose father had been among the occupying 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 in 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 movies at 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 the disappointing results in Montreal, Lefteris resigned to focus on helping the next generation of Greek powerlifters. Always mindful of the support he had received as a youth, he wanted to return his sport in kind.
For him, it had all started at the age of 13, after a soccer match at the Hania stadium, about 100 meters from his Stefan Athlitika sports store, when he was transfixed by a room full of muscular weightlifters who They worked on one side. room.
“I said to myself, ‘I can do that,’ and after talking my way through, I proved it by lifting 55kg,” says Lefteris. “They asked me to join them in Athens the following week at the junior championships, which I did and set the Greek record.”
From there he was hooked, even going so far as to make his own weights out of 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 did.
“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 TV screen in his shop. 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. Athletes competed as individuals and not for their country. And some, like Oxford student John Boland, went to Greece as spectators and returned as Olympic tennis champions, despite playing in ordinary leather-soled shoes.
5. German athlete Carl Schumann kept himself busy. His gymnastic efforts earned him victories in the individual horse vault, as well as the horizontal bar and parallel bar team events. But while he missed out on medals in the long jump, triple jump, shot put and weightlifting, he took top prize in Greco-Roman wrestling.
6. Greek shepherd Spyridon Louis won the marathon, beating his 16 fellow runners by more than seven minutes in shoes his neighbors gave him. In addition to his medal and olive wreath, he also won 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 medals in powerlifting, 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 swimming pool, because there weren’t any. The swimmers were thrown into the sea in temperatures of 13 degrees C off the port of Piraeus and had to reach the shore. Hungarian Alfred Hajos, who despite winning the 100 and 1,200-meter freestyle, later said that during races he was more interested in staying alive than wanting 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.
