Sports need their “heroes”. Those who will be the pole of attraction for the fans. Last weekend (especially on Sunday) at the indoor championships, this made a big difference. For many years, Peace and Friendship (PEF) has seen so many people at athletics competitions. He was fascinated by the presence mainly of Miltos Tedoglu, but also by Emmanuel Karalis, Nicole Kyriakopoulos and others.

What was achieved by the presence of the current best long jumper in the world was achieved in the early 70s by the former pole vault world record holder Christos Papanicolaou. In fact, many times, since even on weekdays he almost filled the stands of Karaiskakis. But those were very different times. We also saw it in the 80s with the great javelin throwers Anna Verulis and Sofia Sakorafa. Then came the golden age of Greek athletics, and the stands naturally choked on Kenteris, Thanos, Bakoyannis, Kelesidou, Maniani, Xanthus, Gaziudi and others. But for an athlete, how did it happen on Sunday? For Papanicolaou only.

However, the question that remains in the world of sports is whether he can go to the SEF next year to admire Miltos, Emmanuel, maybe Olympic champion Katerina Stephanides and someone else. Because there are rumors that we will never see athletics again in a stadium built about 40 years ago specifically for this sport.

The administration of the SEF is calming the world of athletics. But he fears that when something hangs so heavily in the atmosphere, it contains not only nuggets, but also large chunks of truth. We hope this will be debunked…