THE Olympic Games are going home. Athens, founders of the ancient and modern version of the games, last night won the right to host the 2004 summer Olympics, beating off Rome, the 4-5 favourite, by 66 votes to 41 in the final ballot.

The other cities which dropped out in order were Buenos Aires, Stockholm, and Cape Town.

The voting, in the ballroom of a Lausanne hotel, confounded expectation, but was a triumph for the nimble political footwork of the International Olympic Committee's 77-year-old president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, who is known to have favoured Athens to win last year's centenary games which went instead to Atlanta,

and which proved a disaster.

The odds were against the southern hemisphere, with Sydney the venue in 2000 - another reverse for Samaranch who had preferred Beijing.

Despite impassioned intervention yesterday by the respective presidents of South Africa and Argentina, Nelson Mandela and Carlos Menem, who called on the IOC to favour their country for the first time, the Olympics will return to the city which hosted the first games of the modern era in 1896.

Mandela's charismatic influence accounted for Cape Town's survival in a tie-break vote after finishing bottom equal with Buenos Aires in the first round, but Athens was ahead in each of the five rounds which eliminated the city with the lowest votes.

Stockholm, despite announcing yesterday morning that they had caught the ''lone bomber'' who had sabotaged their bid, was second to be eliminated.

Greeks celebrated and wept in jubilation on the streets of Athens after learning that their country, which gave birth to the Ancient Olympics in 776BC, had had the greatest sporting prize restored to them.

Prime Minister Costas Simitis told reporters that Athens would seek to bring some of the ancient spirit of the games to the present. ''This is a great opportunity to give a new spirit to these games, to avoid commercialism and to restore the noble contest,'' he said.

Yet the Greeks will have to deliver a promised new international #1600m airport and a #1300m subway system, supposed to be operational last year, in order to reduce pollution.