ABSTRACT
On the evening of 4 November 2004 Dora Bakoyannis, the Mayor of Athens, rose to address a public meeting at the London School of Economics. Her talk was entitled ‘What makes an Olympic City?’ and she might reasonably have expected her audience to listen attentively to a commentary on the Greek experience of staging the recent Twenty-Eighth Summer Olympic Games. After all, London was then mounting an enthusiastic bid for the right to host the 2012 Games, even if its campaign seemed tinged with defeatism. Paris was the strong favourite to win the contest and Madrid the likely runner-up. Any pointers to themes that might help to tip the balance and curry favour with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would presumably be welcome. The speaker, however, scarcely reached the end of her fi rst sentence before a group of Greek students stormed the platform, while their colleagues in the upper tier of seating tossed leafl ets down to the audience below. After some confusion, those on the platform unfurled a three-metre-long hand-painted banner. It read: ‘18 Dead Workers make a Good Olympic City’.
