Usain Bolt ensures anniversary evening ends with a fitting finale as Team GB's men blunder with the baton yet again Bolt, drinking in the acclaim of 70,000 contented souls, said: "It is magnificent to be here. I can't believe it, it was just beautiful. I was very relaxed, even though there was a lot of attention on me. It felt just like the Olympics. That last statement was open to doubt. Had this all been an attempt at "Olympics: the Sequel," or was it still a mere Diamond League meeting? The make-up of the crowd bore out the ambiguity. Naturally there were purists, here to see how successfully Ennis-Hill might fare away from the multi-event setting, intermingled with patriots eager for any excuse to revive their mothballed Team GB paraphernalia. Then came the parvenus in Sainsbury's T-shirts - had they come for an athletics event, or for a chance to be featured on the "face in the crowd" camera, just so that they could earn a lifetime's supply of Nectar points? The fervour owed rather less, in truth, to our freshly acquired love of track and field than to Britain's enduring cult of the Olympic tragic. Still there are areas of London where folk cannot bear to take down the signature pink-and-purple signposting and, sure enough, numerous spectators trooped to Stratford yesterday in their full 2012 volunteer garb. No one has credibly disputed the Games" effect upon national joie de vivre, or the contribution of battalions of unpaid men and women to extending the mood, but there tends to be a time and a place for such a carnival act. One year on, we have only a determined pretence that the intervening 12 months never happened. As befits a showpiece bedecked in Sainsbury's orange, these were very much the supermarket own-brand Olympics. It is rather like seeing the Rolling Stones return to Hyde Park: just as you know they are never going to match the standard of 1969, so the Anniversary Games have offered only a faint nostalgic echo of the glories of yore. After all, when MC Colin Murray's daftness and dubious gags about Ennis-Hill's posterior were required to ratchet up the ebullience, one sensed that the hearts of some were not fully invested in the spectacle. Whereas the Olympics sold themselves by their intrinsic energy and electricity, here we needed a naff "kiss-cam" to distract fans entering a somnolent state on a hazy July afternoon. The gaudy corporate packaging did not end there, as announcer Iwan Thomas instructed them to stay behind in their seats post-Bolt for the chance to win a car. Granted, the crowd had their moments of high exuberance, not least for Mo Farah's 3,000 metres, but the reaction could never be expected to approach the jet-engine roar that accompanied Mo the Magnificent's 5,000m triumph, when the noise even distorted the photo-finish tape. Behind the gimmickry, there was a noble purpose to the exercise. Without events like this athletics cannot hope to cement its presence in the capital ahead of the 2017 World Championships, and Diamond League status has bestowed a precious kudos upon the affair. But there was a vestigial sense of striving, with inevitable futility, to bracket this as Olympics Part Two. Amid all the frenzied talk of 2012 on the tannoy, it was impossible not to look at the stadium's famous triangular arc-lights through a tinge of sepia. When Bolt's race at last was run, a scattering of fans stubbornly remained, refusing to heed the "Goodbye" message on the giant screen. For this stadium is a place to which so many, still bearing their Team GB T-shirts, mascots and backpacks, struggle to say goodbye. It is the defining emblem of a sporting summer never, perhaps, to be repeated. And to that end it seems already to be a monument, redolent of a past that we can never fully recapture.