THE flame of the XVIIth Olympiad was extinguished here yesterday, sucked into the black oblivion of the night sky by the supersonic passage of a jet, but the beacon of hope for British sport and the Olympic movement burns on.
Two titles on the final day, by a 17-and-a-half-stone superheavyweight boxer and a slip of an Ayrshire-born woman who won the modern pentathlon, carried Great Britain to 10th in the medal table. Eleven gold medals is the nation's best haul since 1920, in Antwerp.
Londoner Audley Harrison became the first Briton to win amateur boxing's greatest prize, and ensured a millionaire career.
It was the first time the modern pentathlon had been on the women's programme, and Dr Stephanie Cook, who put her medical career on hold, is now the champion, only six years after having taken up the sport while at Oxford University.
The total of medals won, 28 (including 10 silver and seven bronze), is Britain's best since Los Angeles 16 years ago, but then the games were depleted by a Soviet and East European boycott. The last time Britain won as many medals in an Olympics not subject to political manipulation was in 1924, in Paris.
Fittingly, Cook, a committed Christian, said that Eric Liddell, Scotland's 400 metres champion of those games 76 years ago, was the inspiration for her sporting career and her life.
Four years ago, in Atlanta there was just one gold, from oarsmen Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent. UK sporting stock was torpedoed. The advent of the National Lottery funding competitors has put the country back on the gold standard. The intensive campaign against drugs did no harm either.
The accolade ''best Olympic Games ever'', withheld from tacky Atlanta, was justifiably bestowed on Australia by the International Olympic Committee's president, Juan Antonio Samaranch.
The games are going home to Athens in four years' time. Greece has much to live up to.
The only blight was partisan TV coverage, which managed to surpass Atlanta in chauvinistic excess.
The IOC, tarnished by sleaze and corruption and on-going doping issues, is not off the hook, but Australia has demonstrated there is little wrong with the product. Doping initiatives, collaborating with the IOC, caught more cheats than ever. These have been the cleanest games in 40 years.
They memorably began in Stadium Australia with one national icon, Cathy Freeman, walking on water and lighting the flame. They ended with another, Kylie Minogue, performing Abba's Dancing Queen. The music had the capacity 110,000 crowd, who each paid #552 admission, swaying and dancing - Men at Work's Down Under, INXS with What You Need, and Vanessa Amorosi singing Absolutely Everybody.
Absolutely everybody in Sydney went wild. All Australian life was there - including the dancing queens: a troupe of gyrating transvestites. It was raucous and moving by turns.
In the arena, Greg Norman appeared on the back of a Great White Shark, attended by a dozen kilted female caddies, and hit plastic golf balls with a five-iron into the crowd; supermodel Elle McPherson rode a catwalk on the top of a steam train; and Paul Hogan, star of Crocodile Dundee, traversed the arena on a bushman's hat surrounded by replica reptiles.
''Let's Party'' said the signs, and Australia fairly did. Rockets soared over the Harbour Bridge and the games closed with an emotional rendition of Waltzing Matilda.
However, the gold in British tucker bags as they fly home today identifies the Poms as the most improbable swagmen of the Millennium Olympics.
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