Strike up the bouzouki and break out the retsina: I think I have spotted a positive story concerning Athens's Olympic - or, to be precise, Paralympic - legacy.

When I read that the 16th International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Conference and General Assembly is to be staged in the Greek capital from today, it took me back to an interview I conducted with Costas Cartalis, former general secretary for the Olympic Games at the Greek Ministry of Culture, well before the fiscal crisis that has devastated the country asserted its grip.

In the context of a general assessment of the cost and impact of the 2004 Games, Cartalis put the preparatory upgrading of the city's hotel stock firmly in the credit column.

Prior to the upgrade, he told me, there were only about 40 rooms with wheelchair access in the entire city.

"Even the Acropolis has become accessible to people with disabilities."

I cannot believe, in short, that the IPC would have been able to hold such an important - and, with 450 people expected, such a big - event in Athens without the new infrastructure put in place for those history-steeped Olympic and Paralympic Games of nine years ago.

It is only a modest legacy, admittedly; it is hard to imagine that delegates, congregating inter alia for a Presidential election pitting incumbent Sir Philip Craven against Alan Dickson, his fellow Briton, will provide more than the tiniest economic stimulus, no matter how enthusiastically the eventual winner celebrates victory.

The Athens 2004 Paralympics helped improve facilities for the disabled in Greece
@Getty Images

But it makes a change from reading accounts of white elephants said to have been bequeathed to the city by the Games.

Frankly, even the most meticulously-planned set of venues would probably have been left surplus to requirement given the magnitude of the economic catastrophe that has swept through the country since the Paralympic cauldron was extinguished.

I left Athens after that visit with a more nuanced view of the 2004 legacy than some.

Yes, the sports venues could and should have been much better thought through.

"Even if we had a significant dearth of sports facilities, [some of] these facilities would still be useless," Christos Hadjiemmanuil, former President of Hellenic Olympic Properties, a body set up by the Government to determine the long-term future of many venues, told me at the time.

"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."

Yet most of the associated transport improvements have been much more successful, even if they inflated the public-sector budget deficit for a time.

"They got probably 25 years of infrastructure in one fell swoop," another seasoned observer of the regional economy told me.

"If you are an ordinary Athenian, it is just so much easier to get around."

Whatever your view, nearly a decade on, on what the 2004 Games did for Athens, Sir Philip and his colleagues can rest assured, as they attend their deliberations, that they have gathered in a place that really needs their help.

And had those Games been staged somewhere else, then I think the present conference would have been held elsewhere too.

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. To follow him on Twitter click here.