Tuesday , 19 March 2024


Modern Greece through Olympic victories, distinctions and economic growth

Dora Palli, General Secretary of the National Olympic Academy, Deputy Director of the International Olympic Truce Centre

In the midst of the difficulties of the days came the huge successes of our athletes in the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 to fuel us hopes!

The successes of our athletes have had breadth in sports and performance, and mark a new "spring" for Greek sports.

Everything shows that there is depth and perspective.

Miltos Tentoglou, Stefanos Douskos, Katerina Stefanidou, Lefteris Petrounias are some of our many athletes who have excelled in a wide range of sports. And of course the men's national water polo team, with the conquest of the silver medal, just the second time in the history of the Olympic Games that Greece gets a medal in a team sport.

It is the "spring" that seemed to be able to accompany the auspicious course of the Greek economy.

It is a proof of the great Greece which came to the most difficult and demanding Olympic Games ever organized.

In a world that is in agony, it is going through a global transformation, living through the years of the pandemic, in a country that is trying to run at a fast pace and climb higher...

And indeed, these successes came to give strength and faith to the strength of our people.

Our athletes were the first to be the first.

They were first in a field that does not fit "means" and there is no worthlessness...

They were just first, because they were the best...

And they achieved it with hard work, under very difficult conditions, with faith in the goal, and of course with ethos!

They were not intimidated by any difficulties.

They were not intimidated by the health crisis or the crisis of values that dominates the modern world.

They were not even intimidated by the shortcomings that may exist and are facing in means and infrastructure.

The athletes gave us their soul, "fought" and took the victory.

Our athletes and the number of those who excelled showed all over the world that there is a dynamic athletic Greece. They have highlighted our country that has values, that is responsible, that stands tall, that goes through any difficulties and bypasses any dead ends.

As Secretary General of the National Olympic Academy and deputy director of the International Olympic Truce Centre, I participate in voluntary programs that promote sports and volunteerism throughout Greece, giving us daily the opportunity to come into contact with thousands of young people, teachers, parents...

There we meet every day this other Greece of ours! People with a high sense of responsibility, who want to offer to society, who love their homeland with selflessness.

This Greece we have a duty to highlight and promote.

This is the Greece we want to enlarge.

It is Greece that fills us with optimism for the future.

It's not just our athletes, it's not just those who participate in the volunteer programs.

It's much more of a new generation coming...

A generation educated, sensitive, mature, that wants to get divorced with the old, with the past. Let us give this generation the field to be able to create a new homeland. To give more opportunities, and of course to fight so that there are no obstacles.

Today we are shedding the walls of the past in all areas. And in sports.

Let the successes of our athletes, the successes of the new generation be a symbolic, but also very essential springboard for our country which is evolving, progressing, changing, winning, succeeding.

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