TO ATHENS, an apology. The world media has let you down. We said these Olympic Games would be a disaster and they have not been. We said the transport system would crawl to an unmanageable halt and it has not. We said that the stadiums would not be built and yet they have been spectacular. We highlighted security problems and they have been few.

And then, the Olympic flame had barely been lit before we started laying into the host nation for the fact that there were so many empty seats. If I had been a punter with a love of sport and was considering making Athens my big summer holiday, I’d have read the press for the year leading up to the Games and gone as far as possible in the other direction.

And if I was an Athenian who was proud of my city and wanted to embrace the Games, then having read the international press over the entire last Olympiad — and the internet has led to foreign comment being widely reported back again — then I may well have concluded the same as most Athenians, that the city would be in a state of gridlock and that I was best out of it, sunning myself on the islands, freeing the place up for its Olympic visitors.

And if I was an American punter, there is no way I’d have made the trip. Because I’d have seen that certain NBA players didn’t want to be in the Dream Team because they were worried about security. And if Athens wasn’t going to be secure for the athletes, then what hope of survival the punters? The millionaires of American basketball may not have a particularly intrepid take on global security, but what we can be certain of is that this is the take their media gave them.

What we in the media have done was to make completely the wrong call. There was indeed plenty of evidence to support it, most notably four years ago when Juan Antonio Samaranch, the previous IOC president, issued a warning that Athens’s preparations were way behind schedule and presented the city with a yellow card. And the security issue was one that would never go away.

But, alternatively, we could have listened to Jacques Rogge, Samaranch’s replacement. For two years, he has been saying that, although the Greeks needed to hurry, he believed they would reach the finishing line in time. Then, at the IOC executive board meeting in February, he gave Athens the official thumbs-up. Everything, he said, was in place.

But that was a message that we chose to ignore. We also chose to ignore precedent. We said that the Atlanta Olympics would not be built in time, we said that the Sydney Games would be brought to a halt by Aboriginal demonstrators and we said that the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur would struggle under a sea of smog. And we were wrong on all counts.

The price of our mistake this time round is unquantifiable, but the fact remains that a quarter of tickets here have gone unsold and Athens is looking at the first loss-making Games since Moscow in 1980. Not only will the Athenians have to pick up the bill for these empty seats, but we in the media have been criticising them for not filling them.

And heaven knows how different it would have been if we’d got it right; if we had spent the past year telling the world that Athens would work, that the transport system would run swimmingly, that the stadiums would be beautiful, that there would be no security issues and that the 17-day festival of sport would be magnificent.

On Sunday night, the night of the closing ceremony, there was a charmed feeling about the Olympic park. On the roads outside, Athenians gathered to watch, to get a glimpse of the fireworks, to hear the music, to cling on to whatever they could of their last Olympic event.

It has been striking to see the pride of this southern European nation. They want to know that their guests have been happy and well-served. They are not cynical, they do not have a great understanding of how they are perceived by the world. And, try as they might, they could not understand why the world’s media has been so mercilessly bashing them.

Their achievement has been to give us an Olympics of which they can be proud. If only the rest of the world had realised that sooner.

MY HIGHLIGHT

Great Britain men’s 4 x 100m sprint relay gold: After years of saying that the Britain four could take the US, this was the one occasion when it seemed they had no chance. A thrilling, long-earned gold — all about teamwork