Olympic legacy newsclip

Recorded for Euradio Nantes. Looking at the issue of Olympic legacy, eight years on from the Athens Games and with London 2012 fast approaching. Featuring Daily Mail writer Robert Hardman, Greek Olympic sports psychologist Maria Psychountaki, and Sport England president Richard Lewis. January 2012.

ENGLISH TRANSCRIPT:

Voiceover: The eyes of the world are on Greece, a nation in the grip of financial disaster. It was different eight years ago when the country was at the centre of global attention – for the Olympic Games of 2004. But what legacy has this global jamboree of sport left for the inhabitants of a country now in crisis? Robert Hardman is a journalist at the British newspaper the Daily Mail. He visited Greece in 2005, after the Games, to see the facilities for himself. He says the problems were already apparent:

RH: It was pretty depressing. One of the first places we visited was the rowing lake. It was completely deserted. It hadn't been used since the Games. The canoeing course had dried up, the baseball stadium was dirty and abandoned. The saddest sight was the boxing arena, which was supposed to have been turned into social housing after the Games. But when we arrived, it was being bulldozed. The problem is that the needs of a city during the Olympic Games and the demands of its community in the decades afterwards are two completely different things. Will East London really want a 3,000-seat hockey stadium? I don't know, I doubt it.

V/O: But stadiums in disrepair were the least of Greece's worries. In 2009, the country was gripped by a debt crisis, and in the years since, not even the Olympians have escaped its effects. Maria Psychountaki is a sports psychologist at the University of Athens – she works with several Olympic athletes. She explains their current predicament:

MP: Financial worries do increase stress on athletes. For instance, for the Beijing Games, the budget for the Greek athletes was around €300,000 for each sport. For London, it's only €70,000, in theory at least. The athletes have been left high and dry – they have no chance of completing their proper mental and physical preparations. Sometimes, this creates problems [for] their performance.

V/O: Could a similar fate befall the UK's athletes after their home Games this summer? Absolutely not, says Richard Lewis, president of Sport England. He says the future is bright for Britain's athletes:

RL: It would be silly for it to happen in England, where we've had this massive investment in the Games themselves and their facilities, to then find ourselves saddled with huge funding problems in the future. I'm happy to say the government have committed to maintaining a secure level of funding for the next four years, right up to the Rio Games. It's the same for amateur sport as for elite athletes: we both have the same level of funding going into the next Olympic cycle, and that's already guaranteed.

V/O: The London Olympics are just 157 days away, but there is still huge uncertainty over the cost. The National Audit Office last month warned that the Games are at risk of overshooting their €9.3bn budget.