Among those appearing on stage were Ray Davies, Fatboy Slim, Jessie J, George Michael, the Spice Girls, Russell Brand and Eric Idle, who led the crowd in a version of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” while surrounded by skating nuns. The Who closed the evening with “My Generation,” after a number of speeches and dance numbers to hand off the Games to Rio de Janeiro, which will host in 2016.
It was an elaborate and at times earsplitting spectacle, which unfolded in an 80,000-seat stadium, built in the Olympic park in a borough of east London that had been transformed from a toxic dump into the center of the athletic universe. The connection between Sunday night’s coda and the Games came courtesy of a few hundred athletes, who were assembled in the middle of the stadium and were entertained or dumbfounded by the proceedings.
These competitors were given cameos at this show, but they provided so many remarkable performances in the last few weeks that picking a single standout is a challenge. One choice is Michael Phelps, who became the most garlanded Olympian in history, after winning four golds and two silvers here, running his career total to 22 medals, 18 of them gold. In the end, he was given a special trophy, which looked like a piece of pewter shrapnel stuck to a base, that read “Greatest Olympic Athlete of All Time.”
But somehow, Phelps seemed eclipsed here by Usain Bolt, the irrepressible Jamaican sprinter who became the first man to win gold in the 100 and 200 meters at two Olympics and finished off a record-breaking performance in the 4x100-meter relay. Measured by sheer quantity of bling, Bolt has a fraction of Phelps’s medals. But perhaps because the designation “fastest man on earth” speaks to such an elemental physical feat, or because he celebrates with unequaled brio, Bolt might have made the deepest and most lasting impression here. At minimum, he joined the pantheon of great athletes, like Ali and Pelé, famous enough to be known by one name.
Others will argue for singular performances, like the 800 won by Kenya’s David Rudisha, who set a world record. “Bolt was good, but this guy was just magnificent, from a different planet that night,” said Sebastian Coe, a former Olympic middle-distance gold medalist and the chairman of the London 2012 organizing committee. Or the American women’s 4x100 relay team, which shaved a half-second from the world record set in 1985 by the East German team during the height of a state-sponsored doping program.
London will be remembered for these athletes and for some larger themes as well. Women were a major story, with these Games marking the first time that every country had at least one female athlete. A 16-year-old judo competitor became the first woman from Saudi Arabia to compete in the Olympics, which she did while wearing a variation of traditional Muslim head garb. A blue belt with little experience, Wojdan Shaherkani lost her match in just 82 seconds, and as courageous as this barrier-busting performance was, it hardly seems as if Saudi Arabia — as well as Qatar and Brunei, two other countries that sent women for the first time — is about to aggressively rethink the role of women in sport.
Regardless, they are latecomers to a long-running trend. At the Seoul Games in 1988, 26 percent of participants were women; in London, 44 percent were.
These Games marked the first time that women outnumbered men on the United States team — and the first time that American women outperformed the men, too. United States women will bring home roughly 65 percent of the country’s gold medals.
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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 12, 2012
An earlier version of a slide show associated with this article contained a picture caption that misidentified one of the people in the photograph. The man waving the Olympic flag in that picture was Boris Johnson, London’s mayor, not Jacques Rogge, the president of the the International Olympic Committee.
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