Quotes of the Day

Come on, people — you don't have to be an olympic gymnast to master this move. My 10-month-old daughter, Coralia, has it down cold. Step One: Stand up. Step Two: Bring your open palms together with as much force as possible. Step Three: Yell, "Bravo Hellas!" Give the Greeks an Olympic-size round of applause.

Heaven knows we deserve it. Greece, my charmingly chaotic country and the butt of international ridicule for the past seven years, really delivered. We staged a successful Olympic Games — something the rest of the planet was sure we couldn't do. Practically from the moment Athens was named as the venue, in 1997, folks began predicting we'd make a hash of it. (How many times did headline writers trot out groaners like "big fat Greek flop"?) But we defied the Cassandras. The graceful canopy that construction crews hauled over the main Olympic stadium just in time didn't come crashing down. The flashlights we tucked in our bags for fear of a blackout were never used. And for all the anguish over our alleged lack of antiterrorism chops, the Games came and went without the slightest scary incident.

I'll admit it: even some Greeks didn't think we could pull it off. In fact, the Games' organizers have yet to find a compelling explanation for how we did it. "It doesn't matter," one of them told me, "We just did it!" Here's one reason: more than a million Athenians — or around a fifth of the city's population — basically decamped for the duration of the games, most of them hiding out in the islands. Result: the capital's notorious gridlock vanished, and the transport systems worked faultlessly. Those of us who chose to stay did our civic duty as volunteers for the Games. We even scrambled to fill the stadiums so that the events could look perfect on TV — admittedly, we were only occasionally successful at that one. Some of us schlepped to Olympia, the sacred birthplace of the Games, to watch a Russian woman shot putter on steroids try to steal the event. (She was caught and tossed out.) But now the party's over, the carnival has left town, and we're left feeling less than triumphant. Some of it is just the inevitable morning-after blues. But there's more to it than that. As we sweep up the confetti and pack away the unsold T shirts, we find ourselves struggling with a huge fiscal hangover. By latest estimates, the Olympic tab will be twice the initial forecast of $5.5 billion. Greece's public debt is already more than 100% of gdp and its budget deficit is in breach of the European Commission's 3% ceiling. Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis should feel no shame in asking the U.S. (Britain and Israel, too) to help foot the security bill, now set at $1.2 billion. But even then, we'll be paying for the Games for years and years to come.

It would be churlish to suggest that all the money and hard work went to waste. We have a new light-rail line and a spanking new airport, among other badly needed infrastructure improvements. And while they're still counting the number of visitors to the Games, the tourism ministry assures us that the industry could get a 25% to 30% boost because 4 billion TV viewers got a picture-perfect image of our magnificent country. We'll see. But I couldn't help but notice that the Athens Games weren't even over before everyone started talking about Beijing 2008.

Money is not the only source of our lingering bad feeling. The doping controversy that marred the start of the Games knocked the wind out of us. Although a record 22 athletes from around the world were disqualified for doping violations, it was our two star sprinters — Konstantinos Kenteris and Katerina Thanou — who got the lion's share of the bad press. And they were never proved to be dopers. O.K., they knew the rules about turning up for drug tests, they violated them, and they deserved to be punished. But International Olympic Committee officials posed triumphantly for the press with Kenteris' and Thanou's Games credentials after they withdrew. Did they do that with the ID cards of any of the athletes they kicked out? No. Because Kenteris and Thanou were singled out, Greece had to endure two weeks of innuendo and sniping: whispers of "dopers" and "cheaters" were heard after every Greek success. (Thankfully, we were able to savor some moments of triumph, not least when Fani Halkia, our 400-m hurdler, scored a surprise gold and helped redeem — in Greek eyes, anyway — the country's bruised track-and-field reputation.) So, at a great cost to ourselves, and despite the humiliation of our brightest athletes, we put on quite a show for the world. Coralia, my 10-month-old, is still clapping. Are you?

• ANTHEE CARASSAVA
• The hangover hurts, the bills are yet to be paid, but Athens threw quite a party