Michael Phelps swims to gold in the 100m butterfly at the Olympic Aquatic Centre during the 2004 Games in Athens

KEY FACTS

Dates: August13 - 29

Other candidate cities: Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Rome, Stockholm

Mascots: Athena (Greek goddess of wisdom and protector of Athens) and Phivos (alias Phoebus or Apollo, god of light, beauty and arts). The cuddly toy characters were supposed to be a brother and sister, designed with traditional Greek dolls in mind.

Participants: 10,864 including 4,412 women

Participating nations: 201

Disciplines: 28

Events: 301

Medals given out: 929

IOC president: Jacques Rogge (Belgium)

Games declared open by : Costis Stephanopoulos (Greek president)

Last relay bearer of the Olympic flame: Nikolaos Kaklamanakis (Greek windsurf Olympic champion in 1996)

Flame lit by: Nikolaos Kaklamanakis

Olympic oath read by: Zoi Dimoschaki (Greek swimmer)

TV rights: $1,498 billion

Accredited journalists: 21,500 (5,500 from the written press)

ANECDOTES

Record

Only one athletics world record was broken at Athens, Russia’s pole vault queen Yelena Isinbayeva clearing 4.91m to little surprise. Promising Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang, just 21, equalled the 12.91sec record held by Britain’s Colin Jackson over the 110m distance.

Wrong target

Defending gold medallist shooter Matthew Emmons was on target for a second Olympic title when in the last stages of the final the American mistakenly shot at his rival’s target, and ended in a deflating 8th position.

EXPLOIT

He had come to Athens with the bold dream of equalling the incredible record of seven swimming golds won by Mark Spitz at Munich 1972, and while Michael Phelps narrowly missed out the affable American did however carve his own niche in Olympic history with six gold and two bronze medal performances.

SUMMARY

A hundred and eight years after the first modern Olympiad, the 2004 Summer Games returned to their birthplace Athens and were notable for an impressive leap forward in performances from Asian nations, and above all China who host the Games in 2008.

The ever dominant US were again the best performers in Greece with 103 medals, of which 35 were gold. But China sent them a chilling warning that a tilt at their crown may be made in Beijing with an impressive second best of 63 medals with a huge 32 of them gold.

The Olympic stadium vibrated to the exploits of middle distance runners, Hicham El-Guerrouj of Morocco winning the 1,500 and 5,000m and Britain’s Kelly Holmes also bagging a glorious double in the women’s races at 800m and 1,500m. Ethiopian star Kenenisa Bekele was unstoppable in the 10,000 while an American trio Justin Gatlin (100m), Shawn Crawford (200m) and Jeremy Wariner (400m) maintained the proud stateside track record.

The only world record was set by Yelena Isinbayeva who cleared 4.91m in the pole vault.

On the doping front their were 25 confirmed cases including many gold medallists. But the greatest disappointment was the affair over Greek sprinters Ekaterini Thanou and Konstantinos Kenteris, who failed to show up for a drug test and were subsequently sidelined.