CIVILISATION begins at the moment sport begins. So said the great Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis: and so, in Greece, the place that invented such things as science, art, philosophy and civilisation, we last night ended the 17-day celebration of civilisation called The Olympic Games.
Some thought that it would never happen, but it not only happened, it was a great Games. It was great for Britain, great for sport and great for civilisation. The Greeks got it right: the people were endlessly hospitable, the transport was immaculate and they even got the roof on the main stadium.
Alas, there was a sting in the tail in the last event. A professional attention-seeker assaulted Vanderlei de Lima, of Brazil, the leader of the marathon, in the closing stages of the race yesterday, probably robbing him of a gold medal and certainly robbing the watching billions of a classic finish.
You can make a logical plan to combat evil: it is impossible to second-guess a fool.
But it was a spectacular Games for Britain, with a tally of 30 medals, two more than in Sydney. If you discount the boycotted Games of 1984, it was Britain’s biggest medal haul since the Chariots of Fire Games of 1924.
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Britain’s last medal was won by the boxing prodigy Amir Khan, who is 17. He had to settle for silver, outboxed by Mario Kindelán of Cuba, a man almost twice his age.
This followed an extraordinary Saturday night at the athletics stadium, when Kelly Holmes, 34, won her second gold medal of the Games, to complete a middle distance double that even Lord Coe never managed. Shortly afterwards, Britain’s sprinters charged to a gloriously unexpected win in the 4 x 100 metres relay.
This was a deeply tearful Games: and why not? Homeric heroes spend an awful lot of time weeping. Matthew Pinsent propelled the men’s rowing coxless four to victory by eight hundredths of a second: in the final ten strokes he achieved the most extraordinary and complete outpouring of his entire self.
Afterwards, he was a shell of a man, in a complete daze, until the medal ceremonies unlocked him and he wept — not like a baby, no. He wept like Odysseus, and no man had a better right.
A day later, we had the tears of Paula Radcliffe, a different matter altogether. She wept bitter tears because she could not win the marathon. We witnessed the grisly matter of the disintegration of a personality out there in the Athenian suburb of Papagou. It was a reminder, if such a thing were necessary, that sport is as ever our theatre of cruelty.
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But, as we start to pack our bags and contemplate a final ouzo, we know that it is the heroes and the moments of high achievement that will stay with us. The Greeks are the world’s greatest myth-making people and they have given us a series of tales and a collection of elemental heroes that will haunt our imaginations forever. Sport may be trivial, but the myths it creates are not.
Elemental? Then let us take for the earth element Reza Zadeh Hossein, the Iranian giant who burst from some cave deep beneath the earth’s crust to win the super-heavyweight weightlifting and set a world record in a welter of prayers and battle-cries.
For air, Guo Jingjing of China won the women’s three-metre springboard diving with a complete mastery of her element, a gravity-defying understanding of its every nuance.For water, who else but Ian Thorpe, the Australian swimmer and the most perfectly adapted aquatic man? He won the 200 metres freestyle with shark-like certainty.
Which leaves us with fire, and for that, we had Carolina Kluft, the Swede who won the heptathlon with blazing and compelling competitiveness.
It has been rich, it has been glorious, and if I ache for the green fields of home right now, I will, I hope, be there to savour the Olympic Games in Beijing in four years time.