SYDNEY -- They came, they saw and some even conquered, but Sydney was the undisputed winner as the Games drew to a close Sunday and the last medals were being decided. These Olympics will be exalted as the best Games ever.

It is a tired, old line that Atlanta only missed out because it was hard to declare the Olympiad the best when a bomber kills two people and injures 110, and transportation problems lock the event in traffic chaos.

Atlanta had to settle for just hosting the biggest Games ever.

But Sydney will proudly accept the accolades the International Olympic Committee is so keen to heap upon it, thus restoring a little luster to its tarnished rings.

Olympic organizers will rattle off familiar statistics to prove the point: a record 28 sports, an unprecedented 11,000 athletes, and 20,000 electronic and print media people.

The most ticket sales -- 6.7 million little blue and gold rectangles. The best single-day attendance -- 400,345 through Sydney Olympic Park gates on Day Eight. A stadium record -- 112,000 spectators present for Australian 400-meter runner Cathy Freeman's victory Sept. 25.

The widest TV coverage -- reaching 220 nations, compared with 214 for Atlanta. The biggest Internet success -- 9 billion hits on www.olympics.com overwhelming the 634 million hits for the 1998 Nagano Winter Games.

If "mine's bigger than yours" comparisons must be made, it seems Sydney deserves the title. But it won't be because of size. Sydney pulled off a great extravaganza because Australians are mad about sports, and the city is fixated on success.

The saying, "Too much sport is never enough," is fast going down in Australian vernacular beside "She'll be right, mate." Despite initial slow sales because of ticketing scandals and "un-Australian" favors for the rich, the Aussie "Joe" quickly warmed to the Games and beat a 100-meter qualifying time to the ticket booths.

Rattling off the list of events you had seen during the Games quickly became the main topic of conversation at parties during the Olympiad. So enrapt were the locals that they embraced the suggestion someone made that Sydney would be happy to host the Games in 2004, if Athens doesn't get its act together.

The exuberance rubbed off.

Sports Illustrated, perhaps joking, perhaps not, has put in print that Australia should be made the Games' permanent home.

The organization of the Games worked because Sydney and Australia are still young and small enough that almost everyone could get involved. Every second person you met had a mom volunteering at the main stadium, holding flowers for Marion Jones, directing foreign visitors from atop lifeguard towers or handing tissues to Cathy Freeman's tearful family.

It was also a great excuse to go to work, clock in and sit in front of the TV for several days or even sneak off to an event, as many Australian workers did.

The predicted transportation disaster never materialized, mainly because the crowds were so good-spirited at the gladiatorial spectacle laid on for them that they didn't mind being jammed by the thousands outside the Olympic Park train station three hours after the last event. Bus drivers seemed no more organized than those in Atlanta, but they were happy to take directions from passengers.

Promised protests, for the most part, failed to materialize, confirming the local saying, "Australians will never have a revolution on a sunny day." The biggest blight on this Olympics was the drugs.

Long after the breathless flattery for the host city has died down, people will still be talking about drugs.

That's not so much Australia's fault. The nation introduced out-of-competition and pre-Games testing, as well as a test for the endurance drug EPO.

But Sports Minister Jackie Kelly, while spouting self-serving hyperbole about having staged the cleanest Games in two decades Sunday, admitted it would be up to Athens to introduce a test for human growth hormone -- the invisible drug of the Games.

There is no shortage of better-qualified experts declaring Sydney the dirtiest Games ever simply by the fact that the latest and new methods of cheating have emerged faster than tests to catch them.

At last count, there had been 35 "doping cases" in the leadup to or during the Sydney Games. Four medal winners have been stripped of their hardware.

And yet the International Olympic Committee's medical head, Prince Alexander De Merode, conceded over the weekend, "Everything that we have found is very old -- nothing especially new or sophisticated."

However, on drugs too, the Games may bring progress if the C.J. Hunter scandal prods U.S. Olympic chiefs to give the IOC a greater role in testing. The United States could, in turn, set the lead for other nations.

There are likely to be other scandals to surface from the Sydney Games.

The Australian media will soon tire of jingoistic patriotism and start tearing at the Machiavellian power plays behind the organization of the Games.

And in the post-Olympic blues, the host city will have to send in the bean counters to find out if it managed to balance the budget, set at A$2 billion. That will determine the value of the Games when the IOC auctions it off again next year.

It has been suggested that the Sydney Games have limited the cities that the IOC will consider in the future because major cash cow NBC, suffering bad TV ratings in the U.S. because of the time difference, is threatening to slash its offer for TV rights to the next Olympics.

The IOC will be scratching its head over what to do after Australia, a modern nation capable of innovations like flawed, but useful, environmental standards for future Games, yet so sparsely populated that the Games went off like the nation's sports carnival, which stops a one-horse town.

Beijing has a lot of work to do to remain front-runner to secure the right to host the 2008 Games.