Photo Finish: The Olympic Games comes to an end

For more than a week, the view from the The Independent's apartment on the 14th floor at the North Star Media Village here at the Olympic Games was what you would expect in the residential suburb of a modern city – tower blocks, roads, cars and people for as far as the eye could see. On a good day you might peer through the smog for up to a mile, but on a bad one you would not even make out the roof of a high-rise building 200 yards away.

In the middle of the Games, however, we opened our curtains to a quite different sight. The skies, which had been a murky white every day, were a clear blue and there in the distance, more than 40 miles away, were the mountains that ring the western flank of Beijing. It was not long before the smog returned, but at least you knew that another world did indeed exist beyond the choking confines of this tumultuous city.

At times, the Games themselves have been similarly deceptive. For the most part – even if you have been here watching or reporting on the action rather than viewing it at home on television – we have witnessed only the beauty of modern sport, with the world's greatest athletes performing wonderful feats to a backdrop of spectacular settings. Television cameras and stills photographers have homed in on the faces of those who have strained every sinew and reacted with joy or despair to their performance, in the knowledge that four years' work has been condensed into one heart-stoppingly brief flurry of activity.

Occasionally, however, you have a glimpse into another world: a view down a ramshackle side-street alongside the gleaming splendour of the new and (for the past fortnight at least) unclogged expressways that link the Olympic venues; the tears of the Chinese shooter Du Li, who crumbled under the weight of a nation expecting her to win the first medal of the Games; the armed guards and soldiers who lurk behind every fence surrounding the secure bubble that encloses each Olympic site; the photographs of the documents that seemed to prove that the host nation had lied about the age of its gold medal-winning female gymnast He Kexin.

Revelations in the days after the jaw-dropping opening ceremony had told you that everything might not be quite what it seemed. The nine-year-old who sang "Ode to the Motherland" had been miming because the real singer was not considered pretty enough, while the children supposedly representing China's 56 ethnic minorities were reported to be actors. The fireworks that lit up the skies over Beijing were real enough, but the television pictures that went around the world included pre-recorded footage from a dress rehearsal.

China wanted to host the Olympics in order to gain acceptance on the world stage, to prove that it is a modern country at ease with the monumental challenge of staging the planet's greatest sporting extravaganza. The images that have gone around the globe have mostly done that – we will forgive them a fake firework or two – though it remains to be seen whether the Games have done anything to ease the world's concerns at wider issues here, like human rights and pollution.

In the end, the images that will endure will be those of great sporting moments. For most of the world, that means the astonishing feats of superstars like Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt. For Britain, it will be the memories of the efforts of new heroes and heroines, like Rebecca Adlington and Victoria Pendleton; of established Olympians, like Ben Ainslie and Bradley Wiggins; or of self-effacing team players, like rower Steve Williams and cyclist Paul Manning.

Their feats, their dedication and their openness – for journalists, it has been a joy to speak to athletes who actually want to tell their stories to the world – have clearly captured the imagination of a nation that has grown tired of pampered and under-achieving footballers. London and 2012 cannot come soon enough.

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