As the Olympic torch is finally extinguished Doug Gillon reflects on a mesmeric event.

It was close to 5am before I left the Bird's Nest for the penultimate time on Saturday. I looked back at the latticed underbelly, glowing cherry pink.

Behind the stadium, towards Wanjing, dawn was breaking. The tower blocks were etched against a sky of almost identical colour. In the trees around the Olympic Park, crickets buzzed, drowning out the stadium rehearsal of the music for last night's closing ceremony.

It was hauntingly, achingly beautiful, the sky the hue of a silk screen landscape. And you could see forever as the sun rose. Like many other concerns, pollution was not the predicted spectre.

The seven-hour time difference meant it was still work time for a few of us, which meant I had a view of the Olympics that only a handful of late-working journalists witnessed. I reflected that I have been mightily privileged to see so many rare views of Games dating back to 1972 in Munich.

I cast another backward look at the stadium, a field of significantly more broken dreams than of those fulfilled. Not just those of Liu Xiang, who surrendered his Olympic hurdles title and a nation's hopes without running. Even so, for China it has proved a winner - One World, One Dream.

We have all been privileged here. The Chinese welcome was warmer than most Westerners dared hope. These were a mesmeric Games, which transcended suspicion and fears. Issues seemed far less in actuality than heralded. Like pollution and the language barrier. There were helpers at every venue, every hotel.

They wrote instructions for your taxi driver, or came and briefed him. A radio link in all official cabs had English speakers on line. Volunteers smiled, and passed the time of day in a variety of tongues. They remembered which one we spoke. No inquiry was too much trouble, down to detailed directions on how to find a seamstress to mend a torn pair of shorts. If they thought you would get lost they accompanied you.

Even the offending armoured personnel carrier was quickly removed from outside the Main Press Centre. No, I don't like this country's human rights record. I didn't like the one that prevailed with the 1980 hosts in Moscow either. But I was as offended by the presence at the opening ceremony of the arch hypocrite Bush, who dares lecture on human rights while defending Guantanamo.

London, four years from now, will find this a very hard act to follow. They staged a cameo performance with the flag handover and a London bus transformed into a stage on which Jimmy Page wrought magic.

But we will play to our culture, just as China did to theirs. A Greek friend said he feared for Athens as we left the Sydney press centre eight years ago. I told him they would not need lawnmowers in their opening ceremony (which Australia had included because of a national obsession with cutting the grass), and that they had 3000 years of culture to draw on. Which they did, wondrously. As hopefully will London.

Beijing was a Games unmatched in so many ways by any I've seen. It surpassed Bolshoi-inspired Moscow and Busby Berkeley Los Angeles. Even the Oriental mystique of Seoul, and the vibrancy of Sydney. The ceremonies were sensational.

And what feats of sporting super-excellence. If this, as I suspect, is to be my last Olympics, then what a final act. Inside 16 hours I witnessed history: Friday evening - Hoy crosses the line in a team sprint world record for the first of his three golds. A fast and obliging taxi driver makes it to the Bird's Nest with five minutes to spare before the lightning Bolt strikes. Another world record - greatest 100 metres ever seen. And next morning, breakfast barely digested, we see Michael Phelps complete the great trawl of China with a world best and a record eighth title. And a $1m jackpot. Eight, here, truly means prosperity.

This was China's most publicised swimming performance since Mao Zedong swam five miles in 25 minutes in the Yangtze. Nobody challenged it as a world best, unsurprisingly. But these days are gone.

There are McDonalds here, Starbucks, ubiquitous Coke. They call it Ko Kou Ko Le. It sounds very like Coca Cola, but it translates as "very tasty, very happy". I know very little about this country, but enough to know not all is what it seems.

And as another dawn began to light the oriental sky this morning, the Olympic flame extinguished, I mused over the way that I had left Sheremetyevo on BA flight 007 (I kid you not), after Moscow in 1980, my bags violated by dour men of a similar ideology to the one which prevails here.

I can't envisage a repetition here. In Moscow Pravda wrote that nobody should accept chewing gum from the visitors, "because it would be poisoned". There has been no such nonsense here.

Once again, sport has transcended politics.

Nine years after the Moscow Olympics, the Berlin Wall fell. What kind of country China will be nine years from now, we can only guess at. But I shall return home with more hope than when I departed.