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"For
Voula Patoulidou's and Pyrros Dimas's Greece"...
Her participation in the final was for her country a big success. Voula Patoulidou, the first Greek female athlete who ever went that far, was not a likely winner.  Although the performances she achieved during the preliminaries gave her some hopes, no-one seemed to believe that a 27-year old athlete, who had not any remarkable distinction in international games to her credit, could stand among Gail Divers and Lavonna Martin from the USA and Jordanka Donkova from Bulgaria.
Nevertheless, 12.64 seconds after the start the Greek athlete found herself cutting the tape first, out of the blue, unable, herself, to believe it. The fall of Divers, who had the lead, only a few metres from the finish, after hitting on the last hurdle, gave to Patoulidou the opportunity to make true one of the most unexpected victories in the history of the Olympic Games. After Divers' fall, at least four athletes finished with a slight difference. Nobody triumphed, because nobody was certain as to who was the winner.
When the boards showed Patoulidou to be the first, even she could not believe it. Apart from everything else, this was the first gold medal that Greece won in athletics after 80 years. In the light of this momentous event, her first words as she was heading to the locker rooms, expressed in the best possible way the contradiction of a society, which, although acknowledged itself as the birthplace of the Olympics, was unable to distinguish itself in them: "For Greece, at long last!". That phrase was adopted as a national slogan that very moment.
A few days earlier, in the indoor hall where the finals in the weightlifting events took place, a young athlete was crying out "For Greece". The cry of Pyrros Dimas in his last effort, the precise moment when he was holding above his body the barbell with the kilos that would offer him the first of three gold medals in the Olympics, incorporated for the 21-year old athlete meanings quite different from those of Patoulidou.
Pyrros Dimas was born and raised in an Albanian region with minority Greek populations, the position of whom became all the more difficult at a time when the nationalistic movements in Albania, as well as in most Balkan states escalated. Under those circumstances, Dimas, one of the most promising athletes in weightlifting, was looking for a way out to Greece. As he confessed, he was preparing for the Barcelona Olympics hoping to gain a distinction, but he did not know whether he would compete under the flag of the country he was living in or the country he wished to live in. Therefore, in the final of the 82.5-kg category, as he was lifting the winning weights, he condensed in that cry the course of his life, a course from the frontier Albanian regions to the Greek side of the borders, thus adding a piece to the mosaic of contemporary Greek history.
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