Paris Olympics: Was the Games a success?
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00:00Good morning from Paris for the final time where the 2024 Olympic Games have wrapped up.
00:05There was a lavish closing ceremony last night and a throw ahead to Los Angeles in four years from now
00:11and I suppose it's time to dissect what we've seen over the last little more than two weeks.
00:16From a British perspective, 65 medals in all that matched the tally of London 2012, one more than they won in Tokyo.
00:23There weren't as many golds as were hoped for, as were expected, but it's difficult to criticise really.
00:30I mean, some of those fine margins involved, if you think about a couple of the medals in the swimming pool,
00:35a couple on the track where British athletes took silver by fractions of a second.
00:40And likewise, there were a few, the likes of Alex Yee, Tom Pidcock, that they won in very dramatic style late on.
00:46That's the nature of sport, isn't it? Competitive sport at this level.
00:50So I think to kind of judge the success of entire games or entire programmes on the specifics of medal tallies can sometimes be a bit folly.
00:59There's no doubt that they've entertained, that they've inspired, that some of the spectacles and some of these competitions have just been incredible.
01:07There are individual sports, I suppose, that will come under a bit more scrutiny, the likes of boxing and sailing, say,
01:12and even track cycling, where at last the kind of gold medal rush stopped.
01:16They only won one gold medal in the velodrome, albeit without Katie Archibald, who'd been penciled in potentially for a couple there.
01:24And then on the games at large, it's just been a huge success, I think.
01:28From Paris, it's been, by and large, brilliantly organised.
01:32The security fears that we came into these games with haven't, thankfully, materialised at all.
01:37The atmosphere everywhere you've gone has been fantastic.
01:40There's been some great French success that's helped that, all the way from Antoine Dupont in the Rugby Sevens on the opening weekend,
01:46through the brilliant swim meet that Léon Marchand had, and almost actually to the very last game,
01:51where the women's basketball team yesterday came so close to ending America's dominance.
01:56But it has been a triumph, these games.
01:58It felt like a bit of a triumph leaving Tokyo three years ago, just for the fact that the games in those circumstances had managed to get on at all.
02:05But there was no doubt that there'd been something missing from the Olympic experience.
02:10And the big question coming to Paris was whether it was still there, whether it could be rediscovered.
02:15And I think, emphatically, the answer has been yes.