Her daughter, Carolina, 21, is an Olympics volunteer, working in the translation department at the Main Press Center. Her sister, Eleni, also is a volunteer. Her mother, Marika, wanted to be a volunteer.
“I said to my mother, `Stop. Someone has to be with me during the Games,'” said Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki.
Only a whirlwind could keep Angelopoulos-Daskalaki company. The woman who has been president of the Athens 2004 Olympic Organizing Committee since 2000 is a hard act to follow.
“I want to be everywhere, to see everything,” she said.
This week, between touring the Olympic Stadium with International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge and the opening of the IOC’s annual meeting, she squeezed in a late lunch with a small group of reporters.
Angelopoulos-Daskalaki left her langouste appetizer untouched, picked at a few pieces of her sea bream main course and indulged in a few spoonfuls of a yogurt-and fruit dessert. She apparently is determined to function on little food or sleep, getting three to six hours per night of the latter.
“I am too excited to sleep,” she said.
Angelopoulos-Daskalaki simply is so caught up in the Olympics she even has taken to wearing the volunteers’ uniform–polo shirt and shorts. That is a startling sartorial departure for a woman who usually dresses like $1 million–and can afford clothes equal to that look.
In a country that remains a man’s world, this daughter of a self-made man from the island of Crete is about to watch her country show the world that it has not been asleep at the Olympic switch for the past seven years.
“I don’t claim triumph,” Angelopoulos-Daskalaki said, knowing too well all the potential pitfalls between Friday’s opening ceremonies and the Aug. 29 closing. So she puts her place in history on hold.
“I am the first woman to lead a successful Olympic bid, and the first to organize an Olympics, period, and da-da-da-da-da-da-da . . . in 18 days.”
Two out of three wouldn’t be bad, if the third, staging a successful Summer Olympic Games, weren’t the most important.
Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, a lawyer and former member of the Greek parliament, took over the Athens bid committee with a year to go before the IOC vote for the 2004 Games and pulled off the victory in 1997 by forcing the factions in the committee to stop pulling in different directions. She also told them to emphasize a different approach than the haughty one that failed to bring the centennial modern Olympics back to Greece.
“They wanted the 1996 Olympics by right,” she said. “We wanted the 2004 Olympics by merit.”
Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, 49, who has two teenage sons as well as the daughter, returned to family life for three years after the 1997 bid success. When renewed factionalism brought Games preparations to a near standstill, leading former IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch to issue what was seen as a veiled threat to remove the Games from Athens, ex-Greek prime minister Costas Simitis swallowed his political pride and called Angelopoulos-Daskalaki back.
She is from the right-of-center New Democracy party. Simitis is from the left-of-center PASOK, which ruled the country for all but three years from 1981 until early this year, when New Democracy regained power.
Over constant objections from other politicians, Simitis conceded Angelopoulos-Daskalaki enough autonomy to hire people she wanted at salaries that were unheard-of in Greece but necessary to attract the type of managerial talent needed. Once New Democracy–also the party of Athens mayor Dora Bakoyianni–regained control this winter, it became even easier for Angelopoulos to get her way.
Of course, she had an enormous clout advantage from the start. Her second husband, billionaire Theodoros Angelopoulos, is part of the richest and most influential family in Greece. She left parliament to work in his businesses soon after their marriage in 1990.
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The family company, Halivourgiki, controls much of the country’s steel and construction business.
Angelopoulos and one of his brothers, Constandinos, are involved in a legal dispute over estate matters after the death last year of their other brother, Panagiotis. Constandinos Angelopoulos has accused Theodore of having diverted family money toward the effort to win the Olympics for Athens.
Angelopoulos-Daskalaki said her father, Frixos Daskalaki, was taken prisoner-of-war in Albania during World War II. His sister, Gianna, was frequently asked by the other women in their village why she would not wear black in mourning for her lost brother. She simply was sure he would come back.
Upon his release and return to Crete, Frixos Daskalaki began as a worker in a factory that made jams and other preserves for export and wound up as its director.
“People talk about Greeks as very narrow-minded, as saying girls should do this and not do this,” she said. “My father was not like this. He was very free [thinking]. He believed in education.”
Describing Carolina, a university student in Switzerland, Angelopoulos-Daskalaki said, “She is very much my daughter–tough like me.”
In her private life, Angelopoulos-Daskalaki said, she is “a very traditional Greek wife.” Publicly, she is an iron-willed person who smokes Cuban cigars and is feared and respected but not liked in Greece, according to a prominent Athens businessman who spoke on condition of anonymity. She was selected “Man of the Year” by the Greek edition of Esquire in 2002 and held a cigar for the accompanying photo.
The French newspaper L’Humanite called her, “The Iron Greek.” In 2001, Forbes magazine ranked her among the world’s top 50 woman managers.
A person who cared more about whom she might offend probably could not have hectored her compatriots into the effort necessary to get Athens ready for the Games. Barring some major organizational snafu, Angelopoulos-Daskalaki and the Greeks will have kept promises few thought possible even a few months ago.
“I never doubted,” Angelopoulos-Daskalaki said. “Many times I felt myself encouraging people, and then I realized how eager they were to show me work finishing on time.”
Greece’s president, Costis Stephanopoulos, said in a Monday speech to the IOC he felt “personally bitter” toward those who said it had been a mistake to give the 2004 Olympics to Athens.
Angelopoulos-Daskalaki is resisting the temptation to say, “I told you so”–at least for a few more weeks.
“There is no other country that has been underestimated so long,” she said. “We ignored it, although some times we used all this as motivation, to prove they were not right. There is no revenge, no hard feelings.”
Before the much-delayed installation of the roof on the Olympic Stadium, Angelopoulos-Daskalaki told the project’s chief engineer, Petros Stavrou, that he deserved a big kiss when it was finished. Not long after the second half of the roof was rolled into place, she was showing it to Samaranch and Rogge when she felt someone following them around.
It was Stavrou.
“Do I deserve the kiss right now?” he asked.
She immediately gave it to him.
Another promise kept.