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Athens spent 20 per cent of its 11.9 billion Euros (about £9.4 billion) Games budget on the sports venues, so this should be of significant concern to young Greek taxpayers such as Yalirakis, whose grandchildren will be paying for them. Four years on, it is clear that the city is undecided about how best to use the infrastructure it built for a 16-day sports event. But few Greeks are asking why.

Officials at Hellenic Olympic Properties (HOP), the state-owned company that is the landlord for 23 venues, claim that the situation is not as bad as it looks. Confidential papers seen by The Times appear to back them up. They show that the sailing venue is run by a Greek company under a 45-year lease signed along with payment of a 5 million Euros deposit and a 14 million Euros annual rent. The plan is to convert it into a marina and entertainment complex for up to 2,000 yachts.

Similarly, four companies tendered an interest in turning the taekwondo venue into a convention centre. Contracts have been signed to turn the Galatsi Olympic Hall, which hosted the table tennis and rhythmic gymnastics, into a shopping centre and the canoe/kayak venue into a water park, according to the documents.

However, politicians cannot deny that only one venue - the badminton hall - is up and running in its new guise: a 2,500-seat theatre that has hosted Swan Lake On Ice and Jesus Christ Superstar. They blame democracy. “All these processes take time. One cannot operate projects immediately,” Sofoklis Psilianos, the general secretary for Olympic utilisation at the Ministry of Culture, said.

Time was never something Athens had in abundance. From the moment it was awarded the Games, political bickering hampered construction, causing Olympic officials to fear that the venues would not be ready for the Games. The same happened with the legacy planning - or lack of it.

A sustainable development bill was finally passed in June 2005. Psilianos rejects the idea that the Olympic venues are a financial burden. He claims that they began yielding a net return for the city in 2007. This year HOP is forecast to generate revenues of 40 million Euros, which would more than cover operating costs of 15 million Euros.

Beyond the political buck-passing over the long-term use of venues, though, lies the fundamental acceptance that, for Athens, the 2004 Olympics were not really about the sport.

Athens was the smallest city to host a modern Games, an event that had become a logistical monster after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001. Greece spent nearly 2 billion Euros on security alone, an unprecedented amount on what may have been a kneejerk measure: security sources say that the flash command-and-control room did not work properly because it had not been tested before the opening day.

Success for Athens is measured not by how many more people are running triathlons but by how much more pleasant an experience a visit to the city is compared with a decade ago. The Games delivered a 21st-century transport system (road, rail and air) and telecommunications network, cleared the air of the worst pollution, cut unemployment and put Greece on the map - tourism jumped nearly 20 per cent in the subsequent two years. For the first time in years, visitors did not dash from the airport to Piraeus to catch a ferry to the islands; they hung around for a few days to visit the Acropolis, mull over the works of Plato and discover the culture of one of the world's oldest cities.

Athenians are fiercely proud of their contribution to the Olympic Movement. In the end, contrary to all expectations, the Games were well organised and the athletes and spectators enjoyed their experience. The city's residents did not bear any additional direct taxes - as Londoners will for the 2012 Games - to fund the exercise, although the national budget deficit ballooned to 6.1 per cent of GDP, which is double the limit under European Union rules.

Many involved in the Athens bid also regret the decision to convert most of the venues into commercial complexes unrelated to sport. But it was an inevitable consequence of construction without detailed planning for post-Games use. “Legacy planning is a prerequisite now. We did not have the luxury to think what to do with them after the Games,” Capralos said.

Athens is still waiting for its Olympic Park to take shape for the next 20 years, but it is hard to find anyone who did not think that the whole experience was worth it. An independent Olympic economic impact report, imposed by the IOC on all host cities from 2004 onwards, will provide a more scientific answer in a couple of years, but until then Greeks are sticking with the touchy-feely Mediterranean approach.

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