1. Rate the performance on a scale of 1-10
I would say 7/10. Although we didn't win as many medals as we'd like, it wasn't a total disaster and we had a lot of young athletes come very close to winning medals which makes us very optimistic for Paris 2024.
2. What were the surprises and heartbreaks ?
SURPRISES:
1-Men's water polo team winning silver was definitely a surprise. They were always the type of team that had an outside chance to reach the podium but for various reasons never did so. This time they played really great and had several big wins, including with big margins (+9 against USA and +6 against Montenegro), also beat Hungary twice.
2-Stefanos Ntouskos winning gold in the men's single sculls. I was pretty confident for the past few months that he would win a medal and said it many times on this website, but I did not think it would be gold. He totally dominated his semifinal and final races.
3-The amount of young athletes we had who did so well. There are too many to list but we had some young athletes finish 4th to 9th in many different sports despite not winning medals, so as I said it makes me very confident that 2024 will be good for us and that those who got 5th, 7th place etc will turn those into medals in Paris. Of course also both of our gold medalists were young too, and our men's water polo team was also much younger than the other two medalists.
4-Having five top 8 finishes in athletics. We hadn't done anywhere near that well in athletics since 2004.
5-Seeing so many people in Greece care about our athletes. In Beijing, London and Rio people weren't as interested as they are now. I think social media helped a lot to promote our athletes and get people interested from the younger generations, and also our national TV made a show where they aired special episodes about each athlete/team over the last few months so I think that helped to build interest as well. People got to know our athletes better and learn about them and their life stories.
HEARTBREAKS:
1-Our artistic swimming team not being able to compete. I don't think there were any other teams in any sports that had to withdraw completely due to positive covid tests, just individual athletes (I could be wrong). Our girls qualified in the team event for the first time ever (besides 2004) and didn't even get the chance to compete because three of the girls tested positive for covid. They weren't going to a win a medal but they would've finished in 8th place probably and it is unlikely that these girls will ever get the chance to go back to the Olympics.
2-Petrounias getting bronze was a bit sad because we thought he would get silver in the absolute worst case scenario. Also our other gold medalists from Rio got close to the podium but didn't make it (4th, 6th and 6th places).
3-Panagiotis Gionis in table tennis losing 3-4 in the third round after leading 3-1 10-4 and having 8 match points in total (because he had another 2 in the last set). He is 41 and in his fifth Olympics, was trying to make it to the fourth round for the first time ever. I don't think he will ever get another chance like that.
4-Not winning any medals in sailing or tennis. I won't go into details but I was hoping we would win at least 1 medal in each. Sailing is a sport we traditionally do well in and tennis is one of our new sports where we recently started to become good.
5-We were poor in the fighting sports despite having a few medal hopes in some of them. Between fencing, judo, taekwondo and wrestling we had 2 wins and 8 losses. The 2-3 athletes we thought had chances to win medals all lost from the first round.
3. Was your country's goal achieved?
I don't think we had a real goal so it's tough to say. I think repeating the success of Rio (6 medals with 3 gold) was probably what our goal should have been, and we did not achieve that (we got 4 medals and 2 gold).
4. Which are the sports that will be invested more in future?
-Rowing: We won our first ever gold medal in the sport, and although our rowing team was very small this year compared to previous Games (we only had 4 rowers), all of our rowers are young and did extremely well for their ages. We also did very well last month at the World U23 Championships and I think we will do well at the upcoming World Junior Championships this year, so the sport should get more funding because we have a lot of potential there.
-Swimming: Despite not winning any medals, we were close in a couple of events and set some national records as well. In the age category competitions over the past few years we are winning some medals which we rarely used to do in the past, so Greek swimming is definitely on the rise.
-Shooting: We didn't win any medals this time and only qualified two shooters, but like swimming we recently started to do well in the age category competitions so it is another sport on the rise in our country.
-Weightlifting: We used to be a powerful country in weightlifting. In Atlanta we had 2-3-0 in weightlifting and in Sydney we had 2-2-1. In Athens we just won one bronze and after that everything started to go downhill in the sport (there was also a doping scandal right before Beijing which obviously played a role). Then in London, Rio and Tokyo each time we only had 1 weightlifter when in the past we usually sent very big teams. People in Greece are starting to notice this decline in Greek weightlifting, and we were in danger of not qualifying anyone for the first time since 1964 until our guy (Theodoros Iakovidis) replaced a Colombian weightlifter who had a doping ban. Iakovidis went viral in Greece after his competition where he got 11th, crying on national television about not having any funding. Now he became famous in Greece and went from having a few thousand followers to 220k+ on Instagram. Because of this, a lot of people became interested in him and want to help. We had people who won Olympic medals in the past face similar problems but nobody cared so it's interesting that Iakovidis of all people was the one to capture the public's attention.