Olympics Overview: The wine all drunk and the fun all over, the world fled Athens last night. There can be few silences as potent or weighted as an Olympic stadium on the first night after the Games end. For the security guards sitting in a booth in the modernist Calvataro arena, tonight will have a lonesome feeling about it.

The ancient philosophers would probably have a choice remark or two to make about the monumental showboat of vanity and folly and occasional flickers of brilliance that carries the Olympic Games. If they watched on over this past fortnight, they must have been amused that the bloated and imperfect global pageant was supposed to represent some sort of ode to their civilisation.

For the modern inhabitants of the city, nothing can be the same again. The Greeks may be the founding fathers of the Olympics but, as they discovered this past fortnight, they have long ceased to own them. The gargantuan pastiche of ancient athleticism and honour was merely paying them a visit.

Cities that sleep with the Olympics wake up different the next day. It is like those old Hollywood types who claimed to have been lovers of Marilyn Monroe. The fact of having brushed up against the epitome of glamour becomes an inescapable affirmation of their existence.

If Sydney threw the perfect games, the city and its people have since come to accept the sobering fact that nothing it organises or achieves will ever create the same energy or global interest, that elusive harmony of goodwill and momentum generally described as "magic". Moscow will be permanently compromised by the political freeze of 1980, Atlanta for organising such an unashamedly corporate and shoddy show and Montreal by its economic mishaps and miserable weather.

The Olympics do not make or break a city but they do in some way leave an associative perception. And it's a once-in-a-lifetime deal because even though the Australians were told to be on stand-by, the Olympics do not as a rule return for seconds.

So what will the legacy be for the Greeks? Mocked, pilloried, queried and constantly compared in an unfavourable light, they nonetheless held up their end of the bargain and are left with a bill of €7 billion to remind them of it through several testing economic years ahead. Not as flashy as the Americans, as pushy as the Australians or as detail-driven as the Chinese will undoubtedly prove in four years time, the Greek attitude to the return of "their" Games has been humbling. The Greeks have been about as pleasant and charming as any one race of people could conceivably be.

Contradictions became the theme of the Games. Greece has a notably anti-American streak to its personality but US visitors were among the most notable and enthusiastic of all visiting nations, despite the (relative) proximity to the land they have been taught to dread most, Iraq. The success of the Iraqi soccer team, knocked out only late last week in the semi-finals, was the political shadow story of these Olympics. When they played their first game in the port of Piraeus against Costa Rica, it seemed all 10,000 Iraqi residents of Athens, many of whom hustle illegal livings around the working-class areas of Omonia, were out in force. Many of these kids had escaped from the Hussein regime and, as widely reported, they drank beer and danced to Jimi Hendrix and were not bothered either way by the presence of Americans.

Yet the Greeks reserved their famous temper for America, both in their basketball match against Larry Brown's raw group of NBA millionaires and before the men's 200 metres final. As was anticipated, the USA went 1-2-3 in the medal count for that sprint but not before the home crowd registered a long and raucous protest about the absence of their beloved son of the track Kostas Kenteris. And yet a night later, the plaintive strains of Bruce Springsteen and Born to Run sounded out as the US relay team cruised to victory in their heat.

Those protests were isolated departures from the easy-going warmth with which the Greeks attended most events. They have their passions, with isolated bands of locals vociferous at the boxing, weightlifting and Greco-Roman wrestling. Given the constant grappling over how to overcome the natural suspicions that now cast a shadow across the entire realm of athletic achievement, the Greeks may have shown the way forward in their reaction to the Kenteris affair.

As the editorial of the local newspaper Kathimerini put it after the stadium protest: "Looking at the American sprint champions people find it hard to believe that their vigour and performance is the result of training alone. People are upset for they deem that athletes do not all get the same treatment. Misbelief coupled with the age-old syndrome of seeing ourselves as victims of international conspiracies generated this overemotional reaction the Western public found so provocative. It is about the difference between the north and the south as captured in the work of the French existentialist Albert Camus. People in the north live and work in a gloomy environment. They descend to the Mediterranean in search of light - and that shapes their temperament. Mediterranean people live under the sun, and are thus intrigued by the mysterious, the otherworldly."

And these, of course, were always going to be the Games of ghosts. From last night's finale, when Italy's Stefano Baldini ran into the Panathinaiko stadium immortalised by Spiros Louis, to the shot put in Ancient Olympia, Athens gave the tournament the definitively classical touch. No future stadium, no matter how breathtaking or expensive or technologically streamlined, could possibly match the 1896 stadium with its track of perfumed cinder for atmosphere. Both marathons were odes to the two elements the modern Olympics so terribly lack: elegance and simplicity.

The days of Juan Antonio Samaranch declaring each Olympics to be the best ever are, thankfully, over. But it is hard to see what more the Greek people could have done to provide a festival superior to what unfolded over the past two weeks. The one gripe has been their failure to fill all the seats. But the international community must ship the bulk of the blame for effectively warning its peoples to give Athens a miss.

As for the burning questions: where are the Greeks? - the answer was fairly simple. Most of them were working flat out for the duration of the Games. Gracious as the Athenians were as hosts, they seemed conscious of the fact that when the Olympic family leaves it will be time to count the pennies.

But ultimately, they must feel it worth it. Visitors who had been to Athens 10 or 20 years ago were astounded at the way the city has transformed itself. Not so long ago, it was regarded as a smog-polluted, dingy port town sitting underneath a celestial pile of ruins. Now, the city has a wonderful metro system and the old working-class areas like Peristraki have been reinvented as safe and multicultural havens of eating and drinking.

As the Olympians depart Athens, they will take thousands of good stories with them. The Olympics was not reborn in Greece, but it moves on towards China having restored some of its lost dignity.