Many favourites triumphed, but plenty didn't: I was one of those left waiting in vain for poor Paula Radcliffe in the marble beauty of the Panathenaiko stadium. The bizarre sequence of events that led to Kostas Kenteris and Ekatarina Thanou, the two biggest stars of Greek athletics, withdrawing from the Games was merely the strangest episode in a sporting pageant where the surreal always seemed just around the corner.

So vivid are the memories that it is hard to believe they are now 10 years old. This is partly because Athens 2004 returns regularly to the news. And this, in turn, is partly a consequence of the Olympic world's most constant obsession of recent times. Yes, the L-word. Legacy.

Sure enough, there they were again, dependable as Lassie, as the 10th anniversary of the haunting, watery Opening Ceremony approached: photograph upon photograph of unused, deteriorating sports facilities bequeathed to the Greek capital by Athens 2004.

Images of deteriorating Athens 2004 venues are plenty in number ©Getty Images



And they do exist, dusty monuments, presumably, to somebody's grandiose dream of a sporting legacy that never materialised

A few years ago now, before the Greek economy was decimated by the crisis from which it may at last be starting to emerge, the man then tasked with finding after-uses for many Games venues offered what remains the most cogent explanation I have heard of why some of them, while outstanding Olympic arenas, were never likely to be viable over the long term as working sports facilities.

"If you think about it in this way," Christos Hadjiemmanuil, one-time President of Hellenic Olympic Properties, suggested. "Large-scale general facilities did make sense for Athens, which lacked large-scale facilities. What Athens did not need was tailor-made facilities for sports which are of completely marginal importance for the country, or which treat as spectator sports activities which are not spectator sports.

"Even if we had a significant dearth of sports facilities, these facilities would still be useless: we don't need a 5,000-seat arena for weightlifting or a 7,000-seater for badminton when nobody here knows what the game looks like.

"These are very expensive facilities to maintain in order to use them as training centres...Training in a fully-fledged arena is exceptionally expensive and completely uneconomical and environmentally unfriendly.

"Think of the volume of air in a closed arena 16 metres high and the cost of keeping it warm or cool. If you want somewhere for children to practice, it's much better to construct a purpose-built training centre."

So changed uses for many of the sporting venues were required and, in the cases of both the weightlifting and badminton arenas, duly found: the former as part of the University of Piraeus; the latter as a theatre for shows and spectacles.

Unfortunately, even aside from the economic crisis, circumstances have sometimes conspired to prevent other new projects from getting off the ground.

Denis Oswald, chairman of the Athens 2004 Coordination Commission, oversaw a race against time to get everything ready for the Games ©AFP/Getty Images



Having dawdled for three years after winning the right to stage the Games, Greece was faced with a daunting and relentless race against time to stand any chance of being ready for its big moment in the global spotlight.

As Denis Oswald, the senior International Olympic Committee (IOC) member who acted as chairman of the Athens 2004 Coordination Commission for three years from 2001 onwards, recalls: "They had to do in three-and-a-half or four years what you would normally have seven years to do. After that we were under time pressure every day."

The human cost of this is highlighted by one extraordinary statistic in My Greek Drama, the memoir by Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, President of the Organising Committee, ATHOC: the divorce rate among the Olympic committee staff was, she writes, "some 55 per cent".

As explained to me by Spyros Capralos, now President of the Hellenic Olympic Committee and formerly ATHOC's executive director and deputy chief operating officer, confronted by this race against time, the then Government passed a law called the Olympic Law that enabled them to short-circuit Greece's copious bureaucracy and hence accelerate progress on related construction projects.

Sadly, given the dearth of penetrative forward-thinking about the post-Games use of many venues, this law ceased to apply after the Games, meaning projects that might endow underutilised former arenas with a new lease of life must navigate their way through the old bureaucratic and political obstacle-course.

Capralos tells me about the former table tennis venue which, he says, a developer wanted to turn into a commercial centre only to find he was unable to procure the necessary permits.

Spyros Capralos (centre) believes Greece has changed for the better since the Games ©Getty Images



He also mentions a new private real estate development that might finally make use of the extensive, hitherto neglected area around the old Athens airport.

"It could have a massive impact," confirms one respected independent Athens-based commentator, asserting that the area in question is "bigger than Monaco".

Then again, in an economy that has shrunk around 25 per cent since 2008, suffering over 20 consecutive quarters of decline, you sense it might still be a while before people start believing again in such potentially transformational grand designs.

If the fate of the sports venues was all there was to the Athens 2004 legacy story, it would be a pretty sorry tale.

Happily, the planning and handling of extensive general infrastructure projects undertaken to enable the city to cope with the Games has proved, for the most part, as impressive - I hesitate to say visionary - as the sports infrastructure blueprint was short-sighted.

It is a personal opinion, but my hunch is that this striking contrast is in part explained by the inordinate length of time for which some of these general projects were on the drawing board before the Games came along to necessitate their realisation.

Stratos Safioleas, who was responsible for international media at Athens 2004 and has remained involved in the Movement, working at present for Pyeongchang 2018, rattles off a long list of general projects delivered as a result of bidding for and hosting the Games.

"A new airport, a new metro system, ring road and highways, an upgraded port at Piraeus, new energy and telecommunications infrastructure, upgraded hotels, a new security system...The Olympic Games transformed Athens from a third-rate city to a first-class European capital," he says.

For Capralos, "We forget how Greece was before the Games...Overall, the legacy has been tremendous, but people take everything for granted.

"We now have great communications systems. In summer, we used to get power cuts when everyone turned on the air conditioning." The "small power stations" installed to make sure there were no outages during the Games, which were at the height of summer, have addressed that problem.

As chairman of a United States-listed dry bulk company, Capralos is also well-placed to offer a business perspective on why the new transport infrastructure was so crucial: "For a country that lives from services, it was very important to have them," he says

The Olympic Village now serves as social housing ©Bongarts/Getty Images



Capralos even mounts a defence of the Olympic Village project, a few kilometres north of Athens, now social housing, which I remember visiting in June 2001 when it was still a 120-hectare tract of part-cleared scrubland where an Attican dog scavenged in the afternoon sunshine.

"It has been a success regarding the residences, not so much the infrastructure around it," he says. Another interlocutor speaks highly of the nearby hospital.

Most people I have discussed it with over the years have, however, been far less complimentary. "They thought they were doing the right thing, that it would act as a catalyst," says one observer. "But it just didn't have what you needed."

It could be argued that the timing of the project was ultimately questionable as well, coming as the adoption of the euro had made it far easier for many ordinary Athenians to take out mortgages and use that route to escape the cramped parental residence.

The scale of Athens's transformation in the run-up to the Games was once brought home to me by a journalist who said that the city got 25 years of infrastructure in one fell swoop. And while you might quibble about some individual elements, I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't think that the overall impact of what was done on this ancient city is profoundly positive.

Did this big splurge of spending, though, help to trigger the devastating economic crisis that has destroyed lives and hope in recent years?

Not according to an Athens-based observer whose views on economic matters I have come to respect over the years and whose comments underline how drastically circumstances have changed in the space of a decade.

"The Olympics cost €6.5 billion (£5.2 billion/$8.7 billion)," this observer told me. "You could add another couple of billion for road infrastructure. But the country was growing so fast at the time that the whole cost was absorbed within three years. Within that context...it was a blip."

It is also just about beyond dispute that the Olympics - and Paralympics - helped to provide a boost to tourism, at least in the four years or so before the crisis hit.

Tourism was boosted in the years after Athens staged the Olympic and Paralympic Games ©AFP/Getty Images



I have been shown statistics suggesting that tourist arrivals rose by between 22 and 38 per cent from 2004 figures in subsequent years.

The industry, what is more, is now once again rebounding strongly, which should enable the new Acropolis Museum - whose opening was described to me as "the last nice thing before the crisis" - really to come into its own.

While the extent of the Games' contribution to this is perhaps debatable, what is sure is that it goes beyond just numbers.

Two or three years after the event, a former general secretary for the Games at the Ministry of Culture called Costas Cartalis informed me that, prior to the Games-related upgrading of the hotel stock, there were only about 40 rooms with wheelchair access in the entire city.

I was reminded of these remarks last November, when the 16th International Paralympic Committee conference and general assembly was staged in Athens. Some 450 people were expected.

The IOC's Oswald, meanwhile, puts his finger on a less tangible aspect of the 2004 Games' positive legacy, when he says, "It was the demonstration that a small country could do it...A lot of people told me afterwards, 'We are so proud that we were able to do it'."

Oswald also emphasises that Athens' initial problems triggered a reduction from 11 months to five in the interval before a winning city has to reveal the names of those who will serve on its Organising Committee.

Those who have observed the IOC's until recently mounting unease at the state of Rio 2016's Olympic preparations might be tempted to observe that this was a necessary but not sufficient innovation.

One thing I think Greece has missed out on is an opportunity to use the Olympics to transform its image in the eyes of the world as a pleasant but sleepy, and slightly unreliable, European backwater.

This was partly its own fault - the initial delay and last-gasp dash to be ready in time were widely seen as all too typical of the Mediterranean "mañana" mentality; and partly not - the savagery of the subsequent crisis has tended to reinforce old stereotypes, unfairly and mistakenly in my view.

Nonetheless, if you judge the Athens Olympic project holistically - attempting to understand how the Games were used as a catalyst to spark the large-scale transformation of the host-city - if, in other words, you can get beyond the melancholy images of neglected sports venues - I think you would have to acknowledge that the positive elements outweigh the negative.

Unfortunately, this way of looking at things rather cuts across efforts being made at present by some in the Movement - faced with the extravagance of Sochi and mounting West European scepticism about the benefits of staging the Games - to foster better public understanding of the different types of host-city spending. By this I mean both separating Games-time operational spending from investment in infrastructure, and differentiating between solely sports-related infrastructure (such as stadia) and amenities (such as airports and railway lines) whose chief benefit will be to future generations of the host-country's residents, whether or not they happen to be sports-minded.

I have to say I detect no signs as yet that this Olympic accountancy lesson is working. It would be nice to think that part of the Athens legacy could be to turn down the volume on such futile lecturing in favour of a drive to ensure that the full range of benefits that the Games can confer are as diligently measured and widely appreciated as the costs.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed here.