Ron Judd / Times staff columnist
Athens pulls off successful Games

STUART FRANKLIN / GETTY IMAGES Greece lets its hair — and balloons and confetti — down last night at the closing ceremony of the Athens Olympics. The Games came and went with few problems.

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Related stories Local mettle: A look at the Athens Olympics by way of Washington Other links Athens 2004 — Day 16

ATHENS — The Games that ended in cheerful song began with a pounding heartbeat.

Seventeen days ago, on a steamy August night, Greece welcomed the Olympics home with a 200-drum staccato beat that lodged deep in your gut.

Somewhere down there, beneath the headlines, overwrought television coverage and judging scandals, it thumped on, for two-and-a-half weeks, the subtle soundtrack to a living highlight reel of the best and the worst the modern Olympics can offer.

On the field of play: Seventeen days of transcendence, brilliance, perfection and tragedy by athletes from 202 nations, many of whom saw the Olympic flame extinguished last night standing, hand in hand, on the floor of Olympic Stadium in the heart of the nation that invented the Games.

Off it? A thousand doping rumors, 22 actual positives. Day after day of breath-holding about security, costs and logistics.

And, at the end, a massive sigh of relief: No terrorism. No gridlock. No worries. Not a single thing happened here more serious than a bellyflopper in the synchro diving pool and a wacko tackling a Brazilian marathoner.

Just like they told us it would be.

Late last night, when the tall, steel torch at Olympic Stadium gently swung to the ground and passed the light of the Olympic flame to a young girl who symbolically handed it to the crowd, the smallest nation since Finland to host a Summer Games could finally give itself the global back pat it craved.

"There is one more gold medal to award tonight," Games boss Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki told a crowd of 70,000 celebrants. "This gold medal belongs to all Greeks."

The crowd roared. But the woman who looks quite comfortable in the world's brightest spotlight couldn't just stop there.

"When the world saw our spectacular sport venues, our excellent and flawless operations ... the world discovered a new Greece," she said.

She might be right. But what, we keep asking ourselves, was wrong with the old one?

From Day 1 here, the locals have railed against the world's perception that Greeks, who barely finished many competition venues before the opening ceremony, were mired in the old Greek way — slow start, big finish.

These Games, Daskalaki reminded us at every possible opportunity, proved that Greece is different, changed, better.

She is at least half right: Greece pulled the Olympic equivalent of a 36-point, fourth-quarter comeback here, running an efficient, organized and nearly flawless competition in an era when many have begun to wonder if it's still possible.

But you have to wonder why Greece spends so much time running to its future when its past, in the athletic realm and outside it, is so uniquely rich.

The best parts of the Games of the new Greece were drenched not in the values of the hip-hop modern world, but the cracked-marble old one.

In ancient Olympia, men competed for a single, silly reason: to be more like the gods.

These Games proved that, clearly, things have changed radically in the thousands of years since: Now women want to be more like gods, too.

The modern athlete has a shoe contract, wears a bodysuit and, alas, might inject the occasional performance enhancer. But among champions, little else has changed in the soul, where it counts.

What separated Mizuki Noguchi of Japan, plowing through that searing Athens heat to win gold in the women's marathon, in that gem-of-antiquity Panathinaiko Stadium, from the guts-on-the-line male Greek runners of thousands of years before?

Has any athlete, of any era and any nation, ever led a charge as courageous as Morocco's Hicham El Guerrouj, fighting off Bernard Lagat and the ghosts of Olympics past, to the finish line in the 1,500 meters?

Could any champion, of any time, look more proud than Italy's Stefano Baldini, the marathon winner, who belted out his national anthem almost loud enough to be heard across the stadium at last night's closing ceremony?

The new Greece, the one thrust out there like an economic-development brochure by Games organizers, amounts to some cool public stadia and seven billion dollars worth of long-term Olympic debt.

The old Greece? Priceless.

To be fair, the Greeks offered up ample amounts of both. But for purposes of athletics and Olympism, we'll be happy to leave Athens with memories of old-school athletes whose performances were truly worthy of the hallowed grounds on which they transpired:

• America's Michael Phelps, in one of the Games' all-time great performances, won eight medals, six gold, in an era when no one swimmer is supposed to be anywhere near much better than everyone else.

• German kayaker Birgit Fischer, 42, quietly won her eighth gold medal at Schinias, becoming the first woman to win Olympic medals 24 years — and six Summer Olympics — apart. Later, she added a silver, establishing an all-time Olympic benchmark for durability, resilience and resolve.

• Iranian weightlifter Hossein Rezazadeh awed Athens crowds by destroying all challengers to win gold in the super heavyweight division, then dropping to his knees, like the gentle giant he is, to thank his god for his strength.

• Irini Merleni of the Ukraine helped christen a new sport — women's wrestling, with one of the most wonderfully unrestrained gold-medal celebrations we have ever seen — the flowing tears in her eyes on the medal stand reflecting why we're all here.

It was another strong Olympics for perennial medal-champ America, which came to Athens rocked by doping scandal but still left with 103 medals — the most notable by U.S. women's dominant soccer, softball and basketball teams — and an even higher honor: no positive dope tests, at least at this writing.

	DEAN RUTZ / THE SEATTLE TIMES From the top of a Chinese lantern at last night's closing ceremony, a young girl invites the world to Beijing in 2008.

Not so for many other nations — more athletes were busted here for illegal substances than any previous Games, an indication both that doping is more widespread than previously believed, and that testers may have grown more skilled at catching them.

Doping assumed front-and-center status before the torch was ever lit when Greek track stars Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou skipped a doping test, then, apparently, faked a motorcycle accident to give themselves an excuse. Nice try.

That wasn't the only test to the Games' credibility. Gymnastics turned farcical, with judges admitting mistakes after medals — notably a gold to America's Paul Hamm — were awarded, and later changing scores at the urging — imagine this — of an unruly gymnastics crowd.

Moral: The IOC, with the Winter Games of Turin, Italy, looming in 16 months, has more face-saving work to do.

Yet these Games, like all Games, proved once more that when 10,500 of the world's strongest, fastest and best gather in one city, the onfield sublime can, and usually does, overwhelm the off-field ridiculous.

Even better yet: The Olympic future appears brighter than the sun over the Aegean.

Last night's closing ceremony, a simple, heartfelt celebration of Greece's most valuable natural resource — passion — brought well-deserved joy to Greeks, and nothing short of elation to keepers of the modern Games spirit.

When the occasion came for the mayor of Athens to pass the Olympic flag to China, host of the 2008 Games, Beijing's mayor practically ran down the steps and grabbed it.

China, which put on its own dazzling display at the ceremony, highlighted by the simple, beautiful song of a charming young girl, served a message: We're ready, baby. You got the sense they could, if asked, light the cauldron and roll out the red carpets tomorrow.

For the modern Olympic movement, that means everything. Four years of fret, worry and consternation about Greece's ability — and perhaps the ability of other small nations — to host the Games during an age of global tension vanished into the Athens night.

The flame now rests in the capable hands of China, where the cauldron will roar to life once more on Aug. 8, 2008. And not even the worst IOC worrywart is expecting the Chinese, already champing at the bit to showcase their long-closed nation to the world, to drop the torch.

Athens, for its part, can spend the rest of its summer sleeping late and resting easy, knowing the truth:

Their Games, the 28th Olympiad of modern times, didn't strain the Olympic heart that first beat in ancient Olympia.

They only made it stronger.

Ron Judd 206-464-8280 or at rjudd@seattletimes.com.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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