It took 108 years for the men's Olympic marathon to return to its origins, and just a moment for a defrocked Irish priest to affect the legitimacy of the result.

With Vanderlei de Lima of Brazil unexpectedly leading the race - the final event of these Games - by close to 30 seconds near the 22-mile mark, a man emerged from the crowd and pushed Lima from the middle of the road to the side of the course into a group of spectators, stopping him completely.

Spectators and security guards intervened, but it took the bewildered Lima several seconds to shake free. As he emerged from the crowd with about four miles remaining, his expression was even more pained than a marathoner's customary grimace down the stretch. And as security guards took his attacker, 57-year-old Cornelius Horan of Ireland, into custody, Lima spread his slender arms as if to ask, "Why?"

Seven minutes after the attack, with about 2.3 miles remaining in the race, Lima was caught from behind by the eventual winner, Stefano Baldini of Italy, and then by the eventual silver medalist, Meb Keflezighi of the United States.

Baldini finished in 2 hours 10 minutes 55 seconds. Keflezighi, who came to the United States from the east African nation of Eritrea at age 10, finished in 2:11.29; Lima in 2:12.11, which was just 15 seconds ahead of the fourth-place finisher, Jon Brown of Britain.

In normal circumstances, Keflezighi's medal - the first for an American man in an Olympic marathon since Frank Shorter's silver in 1976 - would have been the oddest plot twist of the evening. After all, the United States, hardly a power in the marathon in recent years, became the only nation to win medals in both the men's and women's races at Athens.

But Keflezighi's performance was thoroughly overshadowed by what happened to Lima. Oddly, the attack on Lima also evoked memories of a Shorter race: his gold-medal winning marathon in the 1972 Munich Games, which was momentarily confused by an imposter who ran onto the track moments before Shorter entered the stadium. The man completed a full lap before being stopped by guards, but he never interfered with Shorter.

"I was not expecting it at all," Lima said. "I couldn't defend myself. I was totally concentrated on my race. I had to get back into my competitive rhythm, and I really lost a lot of it. It's extremely difficult to find that rhythm again."

He ended up having to settle for the bronze medal, although the Brazilian Olympic Committee indicated that it planned to take Lima's case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport after its initial appeal to the International Association of Athletics Federations was rejected.

In one sense, that seemed an appropriate finish to an Olympics in which results were regularly protested. There were instances of athletes' placements being changed after judging reviews in white-water kayaking, equestrian and swimming events.

In the most famously disputed incident, the South Korean Olympic committee plans to appeal to the Court of Arbitration over the final result of the men's all-around gymnastics competition, won by Paul Hamm of the United States. The sport's governing body conceded that a judging error cost Yang Tae Young of South Korea the gold medal.

When Lima was asked how he would feel if a duplicate gold medal were awarded, he said, "I'd be happy."

The Greeks could not seem to stage a ceremony here without something surfacing to force the spotlight elsewhere.

At the opening ceremony 17 days ago, the unwelcome diversion was the case of the Greek sprinters Konstantinos Kenteris and Katerina Thanou, who missed a drug test, allegedly crashed their motorcycles and ended up hospitalized before eventually withdrawing from the Games.

The attack on Lima came little more than an hour before the closing ceremony.

Lima's lead, once close to a minute after he broke away near the midway point, already had been shrinking under the chase pack's pressure before the incident. And as comfortably as Baldini was running as a warm day turned into a comfortable night, it certainly would have been difficult for Lima to maintain his edge, even without outside interference.

"I knew I had the strength over the last four or five kilometers, I knew I had the finish," Baldini said.

Still, there was no way to be certain that the intrusion had not cost Lima the race. "Who knows what would have happened?" he said. "Maybe I would have won. It disturbed me a lot."
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