Faces of the year: ‘The girl next door’ and the skipper of the 2004 ‘yacht’
The photograph of the year is certainly the one where the second airplane crashes into the burning tower of the World Trade Center. For the person of the year, Time magazine selected Rudi Giuliani, the outgoing mayor of New York, for demonstrating human strength and decisiveness, undaunted by violence and blind terrorism. Likewise this year, instead of Costas Karamanlis or Costas Simitis – with the polls showing the party of the former, the leader of New Democracy, closer to victory at the next elections, and the latter, the current prime minister, as the most suitable premier – Helbi’s People’s Person of the Year is Natassa Karamanli-Pazaiti, the newly married «girl next door» who has kept up her postgraduate studies while remaining her husband’s greatest asset. As he told Giorgos Papadakis in a television interview: «Like anyone else’s partner, Natassa is my life. That’s why I don’t talk about her. I’m lucky to share my life with her.» As for the president of the Athens 2002 organizing committee, Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, who continues to hold the helm firmly amid the storms and gales of the IOC deadlines and government decisions that often founder, her title is Skipper of the Year, skipper of a yacht, of course, and not some rusty old tub. Yesterday, senior ministry officials said the matter should be settled to the taxpayers’ satisfaction before February. Sources said the government’s final decision on the matter would depend on a series of anticipated appeals by municipal authorities.
