Rain clears in time for guests including David Beckham and Boris Johnson to discard umbrellas as ceremony begins
As omens go, this was a pretty good one. A pall of rain that had threatened to dampen the ceremonial handover of the Olympic flame in Athens on Thursday afternoon lifted the very minute the torch entered the Panathenaic Stadium. The vestal virgins, shivering in a tunnel in their diaphanous gowns as they waited to emerge and do their stuff, were not the only ones breathing sighs of relief.
By the time Princess Anne, the president of the British Olympic Association, had received the flame from the hands of her Hellenic opposite number, half the sky was bright blue. The London organisers would probably settle for that when the flame is carried into their own stadium for the London 2012 opening ceremony on the evening of 27 July.
After the torch had been borne to the stadium's cauldron by Li Ning, the Chinese gymnast who lit the flame in Beijing, and Pyrros Dimas, Greece's three-time Olympic weightlifting champion, who also carried a branch from a Cretan olive tree, said to be the world's oldest, Sebastian Coe congratulated the organisers on providing a sample of British weather.
By then the massed umbrellas had been put aside and five doves – only five, perhaps a reminder of the austerity measures recently imposed by the EU on the Greek people – had been released to flutter off into the brightening sky.
It was amid the white marble tiers of Athens' 19th century stadium, built on the site of an ancient arena and one of the world's most beautiful sporting venues, that British spectators heard the bad news about Paula Radcliffe as the women's marathon neared its climax during the Olympic Games of 2004.
Some time after the gold, silver and bronze medal winners had been acclaimed, a distraught Radcliffe arrived aboard an ambulance, to be loaded onto a stretcher and taken to the medical centre. British sport will have a better memory of the place now.
Perhaps the best souvenir of all will be cherished by England's most famous footballer. As he arrived and departed along with the rest of the official party, the presence of "Sir David Beckham" was repeatedly announced to the crowd.
Lord Coe, usually not one to miss an opportunity, could have grabbed a sword off the nearest member of the Greek Imperial Guard and persuaded the Princess Royal to make it official there and then.
Walking alongside Beckham was poor Boris Johnson, plain "Mr". They might have found a title for the only member of the party capable of addressing the Greeks in their ancient and modern tongues. And for once London's blond bombshell was forced to recognise that the girlish screams were not for him.
"I love the smell of legacy in the morning," Boris had said earlier at breakfast time, sniffing the Athenian air and savouring the taste of a spur-of-the-moment soundbite. Although the air at that actual moment was the artificially processed stuff to be found in the meeting room of a five-star hotel, he was answering a question about the potentially ruinous effect of Olympic investment on a city's economy by stressing the beneficial effect on the city's notorious pollution and of the work done to improve public transport and reduce traffic jams before the 2004 Games.
"The air is cleaner," he continued, "and the stones of the Parthenon are no longer corroded by the sulphur in the way they were before thanks to the Olympic Games of 2004, and for me that's a very moving and important thing."
In Athens, Johnson is in his element – or one of them. He studied classics at Oxford, bestowed such names as Milo, Cassia and Apollo upon his children, and increased his visibility several years ago with a BBC series on the ancient world.
On Wednesday evening he had climbed the Parthenon steps to welcome the flame at the end of its journey around Greece. The buildings atop the Acropolis, he pointed out, had been among the beneficiaries of an Olympic investment of around €8bn (£6.4bn).
"It's a wonderful thing to see the benefits here," he said. "Here in Athens, where they're going through a tough time at the moment, there's no doubt at all that the Olympic Games in 2004 did deliver tangible benefits. We flew into an airport and drove on roads that would not have existed had it not been for the Olympic Games. The quality of the air is considerably sweeter for the installation of mass rapid transit systems. We are breathing legacy here, if I can put it that way."
But had the investment in the Olympics eight years ago not contributed to the problems currently threatening to drive Greece out of the eurozone, and did that not carry threatening portents for London? "They have a national debt of €320bn, and I'm not certain that the Olympic investments are the problem," Johnson said.
"The structural and economic problems far outweigh that. Many of the structures that you see around you in Athens were produced to celebrate athletic events of one kind or another, and here they still are, drawing tourists. The social and human benefits of the Games are something we also expect to see in London. The only thing that fills me with anxiety is that I can't see the downside at the moment."
And if he were Stuart Pearce, the coach of Britain's Olympic football team, would he pick Beckham? "Of course I would. But that's why I'm not in charge of the football team."
The flame was carried away by London's dignitaries for safe keeping overnight before being flown on Friday evening to an airfield near Penzance, from where it will begin its relay around Britain, starting on Saturday morning when it passes into the hands of Ben Ainslie, the triple gold medal-winning sailor. The first of 8,000 torchbearers, Ainslie will pass it on to Anastasia Swallow, an 18-year-old junior international surfer from St Ives. Read More
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