Olympics/Paralympics

It's been a massive two-and-a-half weeks of Olympic action.

We asked 14 of our reporters from BBC Sport and 5 Live to pick their best and worst moments.

At some time, in some place, there is always a story.

As the Olympic action wound down on Sunday it was at the National Indoor Stadium, where the Iceland handball team had just lost to France in the men's final.

The Icelanders got a bit of a pasting in the end but their fans didn't mind.

It was still their best Olympic performance since 1956 (when they won a triple-jump silver).

Beijing

At around 8am on Saturday morning, a pack of Britain's young canoeists gathered at the National Sports centre at Bisham Abbey to watch Tim Brabants power his way down the flat water of the Shunyi lake.

The (remaining) champagne had been on ice since Friday, when Brabants became Britain's first ever Olympic gold medallist in the sport.

"In the first two strokes there was no doubt I was going to win. No-one was going to come past me, I felt fantastic," he'd said after his win over 1,000m and hopes were high he would become team GB's fourth double gold medallist at this Games over the 500m course.

Sadly, he was out-paddled to the gold in a thrilling finish ("you could throw a doily over the three of them" according to Ben Dirs, our text commentator on duty at the time).

But he did pick up a bronze to make sure the sport exceeded its 2008 medal target of two (Brabants' pair plus slalom silver for Aberdonian David Florence), to cue more corks popping among his fellow paddlers.

And it's not just because Brabants is apparently "one of the nicest, most humble, self-effacing elite athletes you could meet," according to Anne Ferguson, U23 development manager at the British Canoe Union.

International Broadcast Centre, Beijing

On Sunday afternoon a global audience of many billions will watch the Olympics closing ceremony in Beijing's Bird's Nest.

A chance for China to bid farewell to the Games - probably with a huge collective sigh of relief at pulling off such a magnificent sporting show, without (so far) the feared protests, pollution and positive drug test fest, talk of which dogged the build up.

Normally, that would be it, the British media would pack up and go home along with the athletes and we'd all remind ourselves what a football looks like.

Just in case you'd forgotten, this time round it's different as for Britain it's the start of our four-year journey to host the greatest show on earth.

Beijing

Britain have won 39 medals at this Olympics - but have any of them been harder earned than David Davies' silver in the men's 10k open water race?

And is there a more deserving champion than the guy who beat him to gold?

Welshman Davies said he felt "violated" after his swim - he was kicked in the mouth, swum over, and had his goggles knocked off in the course of the one hour 51mins 51second race.

Wednesday's women's winner Russian Larisa Ilchenko said it had felt like "boxing not swimming".

And in today's race, pundit and former Olympic bronze medallist Steve Parry said it looked like Davies was having to practice the art of taekwondo at the same time as well as executing his strokes.

By the end of it he was tacking like Ben Ainslie as he flailed up the final 300m, his wayward line in part responsible for losing him his seven-metre lead to eventual winner Dutchman Maartin van der Weijden.

A gold medal was sweet reward for Sheffield's Paul Goodison after being so disappointed with fourth place in Athens he nearly quit the sport.

But he had to display the most ruthless of tactics to make sure of it.

Four years ago, Goodison saw his medal chance slip through his fingers like a runaway anchor chain in the final minutes of the final race.

National Indoor Stadium, Beijing

0.025.

That's how much stood between Beth Tweddle and her long-awaited, and deserved, dream of an Olympic medal.

The British gymnast finished fourth in her uneven bars final at the Olympic Gymnastics Hall tonight by the narrowest of margins.

She was pipped by tiny Chinese sensation Yang Yilin, who is just 16 (but looks about 13) and who pulled off a wonderful routine which ended with a full-length somersault (apologies gymastics' fans if there is a proper name for this) and stuck the landing for a 16.650.

Yang's dismount was greeted with a huge roar from the home crowd, and brought a beaming smile to her young face.

National Indoor Stadium, Beijing

0.025.

That's how much stood between Beth Tweddle and her long-awaited, and deserved, dream of an Olympic medal.

The British gymnast finished fourth in her uneven bars final at the Olympic Gymnastics Hall tonight by the narrowest of margins.

She was pipped by tiny Chinese sensation Yang Yilin, who is just 16 (but looks about 13) and who pulled off a wonderful routine which ended with a full-length somersault (apologies gymastics' fans if there is a proper name for this) and stuck the landing for a 16.650.

Yang's dismount was greeted with a huge roar from the home crowd, and brought a beaming smile to her young face.

Ling Long Pagoda, Beijing

Let's start with the numbers.

She's 19 years old.

This was her first Olympics.

On Monday she became the first woman to win a British swimming gold for 48 years.

On Saturday she became the first British swimmer to win two golds at the same Games for 100 years (the last was Henry Taylor in 1908).

She is only the third British athlete since World War Two to win two golds at the same Games (the others being Kelly Holmes, 800m/1500m 2004 and Richard Meade, three-day eventing, 1972). [1308 BST UPDATE: And now Chris Hoy keirin/men's sprint, 2008].

Rebecca Adlington won her second gold in the 800m final with a winning margin of more than six seconds - in a new world-record time of 8 minutes 14.1 seconds.

It was a record which had stood for 19 years, the oldest record in the swimming book and she broke it by more than two seconds.

But let's look at some less sexy numbers. The ones that really matter, the real story behind Rebecca Adlington's double gold in the pool.

Storms caused havoc for a while at the Olympics today. Rain, wind, thunder and lightning swept through Beijing and Shunyi again - turning Olympic fans into pixies as they snapped up cheap plastic macs (price: five yuan = 40p) to protect them from the elements.

Apparently the parents of Aberdonian David Florence, who won a rare canoeing silver earlier in the week, were close to a lightning strike at the Great Wall and as a result were checked over by the British Olympic Association's medical team - but thankfully found to be uninjured.

Back in Olympic Green, it looked like a Smurf convention was in full swing as thousands of Chinese tried to make the best of it (macs come in blue, white, yellow and pink and quickly sold out).

Presenters John Inverdale and Sir Steve Redgrave managed to find a pair however, as they broadcast live from the rowing lake at Shunyi, which was worst-hit by the weather, causing chuckles from those who watched them on TV.

International Broadcast Centre, Beijing

The perceived wisdom among coaches is that it takes seven years to train someone so they're physically and mentally ready for an Olympic Games.

So, when the sacrifice has been so great, especially when so many of the thousands of athletes here are everyday people with day jobs and bills to pay like the rest of us, it's no surprise to see so much emotion written on the faces of the winners.

But more often, and sometimes away from the cameras, the losers.

Beijing

I've just been to the opening ceremony.

I have to keep much of what I saw under my hat as it was an "embargoed" dress rehearsal, of which only 30 seconds of quite general footage has been released.

Since a Korean TV crew filmed a bit of Saturday's rehearsal and stuck it on You Tube (they have a few goes at it to get it right), the Chinese Olympic officials have been very jumpy.

But I don't think I'm giving too much away if I tell you this...