RE: Is Greece really that small, or a coincidence?
Apparently, the 11th winner of the 20km Walk, Athina Papagianni, is also from Preveza. I don’t know her (or at least, I think I don’t), but it is a surprise for me to see two people from Preveza’s Track & Field Club (named “Asteras”), have two big athletes.
When I was living in the area, I knew of only one person who was a good athlete (not international quality, but among the first 8 greek people in Decathlon, back in 1992-3). But I haven’t heard of anything else of Preveza people bring up other talents through the years. Preveza was a very “dead” place for track & field athletes. It was nice to see two of them now in Olympic games, on the same race, no less.
I guess things have changed there since I left Greece in 1997. When I was doing some 100m sprint and (mostly) javellin in 1989, we didn’t have much support from anyone. In fact, my father was not even happy with me training because he is an old fashioned man (“women should not do that stuff, they should just be respected housewives”), and back then not many women was training in general, especially in my area. I defied him of course, as I always had, but with the little support I had for my training effort and my… lazyness (yes, I am very lazy and always has been