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Address
By Mr Nikos FILARETOS (GRE)
Member of the International Olympic Committee
President of the International Olympic Academy
Secretary General of the ICMG and
Vice Chairman of the Commission for Culture and Olympic Education of the IOC
Today's opening ceremony of the 41 st Session of the IOA - the first of the new
millennium is especially important. Not so much because it is the first of the four
years of the 2004 Olympiad, but mainly because it marks the end of an historic,
most important and troubled period of the Olympic Movement.
Our President, the President of the IOC Mr Juan Antonio Samaranch, who is
also the honorary President of the IOA, will retire — in less than a month - from
the presidency of the IOC, after a brilliant and productive performance of his
duties for 21 years.
My dear President, friend above all, and colleague Juan Antonio, we will miss
you a lot. We met for the first time if 1978, on the occasion of the organisation of
the IOC Session in Athens. You were a member of the IOC while I was Secretary
General of the Hellenic Olympic Committee. We collaborated a year later, when
I took over as Secretary General of the International Committee of the Mediterranean
Games, just before the 8 th Mediterranean Games of Split, in the then
Yugoslavia of President Tito. The Mediterranean Games are an institution for
which you have always had a weakness. I remember how much you helped me
with your wise advice and your support. And, if I have the honour to be still the
Secretary General of the ICMG, while we are programming now the Mediterranean
Games of 2005 in the City of Almeria in Andalucia. This I owe mostly to you.
Yet you showed even greater affection and support for the International
Olympic Academy ever since the IOA was headed by my predecessor and friend,
the much regretted professor and IOC member Nikolaos Nissiotis, who has really
graced the IOA from 1978 until his unexpected and premature death in 1986.
During your 21-year term you have missed only four times the opening
ceremony of our yearly Session for Young Participants. This too is an indication
of your affection toward the IOA. The fact that you are retiring from the active
presidency of the IOC does not mean that you will stop coming here every year,
and furthermore, in 2002, when you will be free from many obligations, all of us
would want you to come to Olympia and live with us for a few days.
As President of the IOC you were a pragmatist and a realist. You faced every
difficult moment and every storm with patience and composure, and you won.
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