ABSTRACT
On 18 August 2004 the 17-year-old Ilias Iliadis won the gold medal in the Judo (81 kg category) at the Athens Olympics. The next day both the Greek and international press were eager to tell his tearful story: Iliadis was ‘a Greek Pontic repatriate’, a ‘proud son’ of the community from the Black Sea who ‘had returned to their ancestral homeland’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was, in the wordplaying title of Figaro of 18 August, ‘L’Odyssée d’ Iliadis’, and the athlete was seen by Le Monde of 19 August as a typical ‘héros Grec, venu de Géorgie’. Iliadis himself supported this narrative by declaring that his life-hero was Alexander the Great and by dedicating his medal to ‘all Greeks, especially the co-ethnic migrants’ �in Greek: ���������� (hereafter: omogeneis)]. He was also eventually decorated by the Pan-Pontic Organization of Greece, its president announcing that: ‘In him we honour our repatriates [palinostountes], the Pontic Greeks from the Soviet Union who came as refugees at the end of the twentieth century to the land of their forefathers.’
