Life in the Olympic bubble can seduce its inhabitants into a false romanticism. Take Thomas Bach, the ultimate Lausanne aristocrat, who declared at the climax of these Tokyo Games: “When you were at competitions, many times you did not realise that there were no spectators.”

On the contrary, you noticed it everywhere: at an Olympic Stadium where world record-setters were cheered only by their coaches, at concession stalls staffed by volunteers with nobody to serve and, most poignantly of all, at the vast fan park beside Tokyo Bay, a fenced-off ghost ship offering a jarring reminder of all this spectacle should have represented.

The temptation in wrapping up any Olympics is to be triumphalist, to suggest that every doubt was confounded, that every bureaucratic nightmare was justified by the glorious sport. But in Tokyo 2020’s case, this feels glib.

It breaks the heart to see so many lovingly-curated venues built for a celebration of which the Japanese people could play no part. Even for the president of the International Olympic Committee, it takes some gall to declare these past 16 days an unqualified success, while saddling the hosts with an €21 billion bill for pleasures that they were personally denied.

At least they were spared the message that Bach was most desperate to preach, the notion that the Tokyo Olympics could signal humanity’s final defeat of coronavirus. That battle is anything but won, as anyone who has endured the battery of anti-Covid measures here can testify, not least those close contacts thrown into a fortnight’s hotel quarantine despite testing negative daily. For athletes cocooned in their quarters, it has made for a gruelling rigmarole. Allyson Felix, now the most decorated American Olympian in track and field, said she could not wait to go home.

At face value, the round-the-clock restrictions have worked. The 571,000 tests conducted on accredited personnel have returned a positivity rate of just 0.02 per cent. But is this a sign of vigorous policing, or of the fact most of those travelling to Japan were fully vaccinated? Nothing in Tokyo is as it seems. The official line is visitors have been treated like plague-carriers to protect a city in a “state of emergency”. But the emergency can be difficult to detect. Shopping centres are packed, streets are bustling, while even an 8pm curfew is arbitrarily enforced, with many bars in the Shinjuku district open through the night.

When the citizens of Tokyo pause to consider whether these Games were worth the colossal imposition, their answer is likely to be ambivalent. Even for a global city, a showpiece of this magnitude comes around once in a lifetime.

The IOC calculates, though, that local inconvenience is offset by the worldwide exposure. It understands that the Games remain perhaps the most powerful escapist drug in existence. All it takes is one moment of wonder, one illustration of stirring sportsmanship, such as Mutaz Essa Barshim sharing his high-jump gold medal with Gianmarco Tamberi, for cynicism to be doused.

But this triumph belongs less to Bach than to athletes who, isolated from their support networks and subject to draconian strictures, have still conjured astounding performances. Even in an empty Olympic Stadium, Karsten Warholm ran the 400 metres hurdles a tenth of a second faster than this year’s British champion managed on the flat. In the women’s race, Sydney McLaughlin and Dalilah Muhammad both produced times to shatter the old world record.

The closing ceremony handover to the French was lavish. Tauntingly for Tokyo, scenes of wild abandon beside the Eiffel Tower had to be played on giant screens, in an Olympic Stadium devoid of fans. The pathos when it came for the flame to be extinguished was inescapable. In one sense, Japan could be intensely proud of what it had accomplished against the most unenviable odds. But in another, these were hosts who deserved so much better than the hand they were dealt. Journalists preparing to depart last night were being handed origami gold medals by the volunteers, with the message: “Thank you for coming to Tokyo.”

Bach expressed confidence that these would be remembered as the Games of peace and solidarity. It seemed too idealistic a statement on an event so engulfed by Covid turmoil, drawing such polarising reactions about whether they should happen at all. There is perhaps one certainty: that the easiest option, considering the myriad crises that confronted Tokyo, was to do nothing. These Games could simply have crumbled under the weight of fatalism, deciding that it was wiser all round to cave in and let the world wait for Paris.

Instead, Tokyo 2020, while troubled and deeply imperfect, was delivered for the sake of athletes who otherwise risked never having their chance to fulfil their talents. Talk of a lost generation was not exaggerated, given that seven in 10 of them would have this one shot at glory. It is to them, and to the endless forbearance of Tokyo hosts shut out of their own jamboree, that the greatest debt of gratitude is owed.

(© Telegraph Media Group Limited 2021)