KEY POINTS:
The tumult and the shouting dies. In the small hours of tomorrow morning, New Zealand time, the Games of the 29th Olympiad will draw to a spectacular close.
The event will be, as protocol demands, declared the greatest Olympics ever. And the world's athletes will be summoned to re-assemble in four years in London.
For all the controversy that attended on some aspects of the organisation - the authorities' paranoia about freedom of information and, in particular, a distastefully totalitarian disinclination to let the facts get in the way of a good-news story - the Games have been extraordinarily well run.
The host nation has plainly pulled out all the stops, raking the sea on the sailing course free of a rudder-tangling algae and even virtually shutting down private transport and heavy industry to keep the skies clear. The Chinese have good reason to be proud of their achievement.
New Zealanders, too, have had plenty to cheer about in a fortnight of competition that has seen our team do the nation proud.
The raw numbers are creditable enough: with nine medals - three gold, one silver and five bronze - our athletes finished 21st on the overall table.
But proportionate to its population, this country had the fourth-biggest medal haul of all countries. Our 2.15 medals per million people was beaten only by Jamaica, the country that gave us, in the world's fastest man, Usain Bolt, one of the Games' great sensations; Bahrain, and Estonia and put us ahead of the Australians - which just proves what we already knew: that a Kiwi is worth five Australians any day.
To single out individual achievements is invidious: all our team members, not simply the medallists, have held the flag aloft.
The victors and the ones who have dealt with disappointment and held their heads high deserve our admiration in equal measure.
They have acquitted themselves with commitment and passion on an international stage and shown themselves to be exceptional athletes and human beings.
