Prepare for the worst-ever case of Monday-it is

By PETER CALDER

If you're reading this before lunch (and if Sydney Airport is coping with the busiest day in its history) I'm somewhere over the Tasman on the way home.

And if the experience of the weekend is any guide, I'm not feeling so good. There's a hollow space in the middle of my abdomen where the Olympics used to live.

For three weeks and a day, the run-up to and the staging of the 27th Olympiad has been my entire world and I've been swept up, sometimes even slightly against my will, in the occasion.

What's left now is that gut-wrenchingly empty sensation which follows any period of high, wild excitement.

The papers here are warning the entire city to prepare for a period of post-party depression. They're passing on tips from counsellors about how to deal with what they are calling Mondayitis - though I always thought that term applied to the aversion to work after a great weekend.

Whatever the name, this sense of anti-climax, this morning-after-the-night-before blues is predicted to have most of Australia in its grip for the next few days. And it's got me as well.

It's doubtless a natural protective mechanism, a way of bringing body and soul down to earth. But it's also the price you pay for any extraordinary experience, a kind of emotional equivalent of that law of Isaac Newton's which says that actions have opposing reactions.

And it has been an extraordinary experience. At the time I wrote this, I hadn't heard IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch proclaim in his closing ceremony speech that Sydney's had been the best Games ever, but it was a safe bet that he would. Certainly those with clear memories of Atlanta spoke of gridlock and ill-tempers in sultry southern heat and swore they thought they had arrived on another planet when they came Down Under. Meanwhile, the cracks already appearing in Athens' preparation for 2004 are about the same size as the world's misgivings about what the Games will be like in the polluted chaos of that city.

These are only the second Olympics to be held south of the equator and - notwithstanding the suggestions, made only half in jest, that Sydney be made the Games' permanent home - they are unlikely to pass this way again until the second half of the century.

The shaky infrastructures of the South American and South African subcontinents make Australia the only likely southern hemisphere country to host the Games - and if Sydney wants to boost its bid chances it need only say: "Remember 2000? Didn't we do well?"

And they did. Australians might resent the idea of a Kiwi piggybacking on their success - look at Australasia's medal tally, well over 60 - but I have felt the stirrings of an Anzac pride this month, not at the host country's sporting success but at what a great job they've made of running the Games.

What we share with the Australians is a down-to-earth, fuss-free sense that when a job wants doing it just gets done.

Sydney and Australia have made a spectacularly good fist of one of the greatest organisational challenges imaginable. Predictions of transport chaos, poor ticket sales, Aborigine riots have come to nothing; even the stain of drug use - these have seemed like the most drug-riddled Games, but that's because they have been the most rigorously and effectively policed - has not marred the glorious achievements of those who compete using only their body and wits.

There may have been moments in the past fortnight when it has all seemed too much.

The Olympics are an endurance event for spectators too, especially perhaps the ones with notebooks in their hands. At times we may have seemed to get a little carried away, but we weren't overstating matters.

However big we said it was, it was bigger.

Trust us on this: you had to be there.