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Address
By Mr Nikos FILARETOS (GRE)
Member of the IOC
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
It has become a ritual, every year, around the same period and at the same
place to hold this closing ceremony. Though it takes place always in the morning
hours, the scenery around us appears somewhat melancholic.
Another year marked by the International Session for Young Participants comes
to its end; the place will be deserted, the rooms will not be animated by
your passionate presence; everything will become quiet - the corridors, the
playgrounds, the benches - and so will your President.
By tomorrow, the Academy will not resound with your voices. And there is
nothing more frigid than a place like this without the presence of youth. It will
look like a mausoleum. Others might find no explanation for this, but I know it:
tomorrow already, I will be missing all these voices that awake in me this feeling
of nostalgia expressed in such a characteristic way by the verses of a great Greek
poet, Konstantinos Kavafis:
Ideal and beloved voices
Of those who have vanished forever
During this whole period, so short and yet so intense, I have been waiting
for this last moment to sign with relief. And though the moment has come, it is a
different feeling that swells my breast. It is this strange breath, this experience that
I will try share with you, even if it isn't so easy to explain.
This is not a personal speech. It is as though you are listening to somebody
who tried his best to transcend the limits of his own person and talk to you,
knowing that a heavy responsibility is lying on his shoulders: to say "farewell".
Before leaving this place - to which some of you might not return - please
take a last good look around and think that tomorrow it will be transformed into
memory. As the Greek poet and Nobel Prize George Seferis wrote, memory hurts
whenever you may touch it.
It will not take long before you realise that memory is the most alive presence
in our being. "I remember" means "I feel pain". And it hurts the soul to remember
everything that is gone and lost perhaps forever.
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