This year's Olympic Games in Athens cost nearly nine billion euros ($11.5 billion), almost double the amount forecast a year before the opening ceremony, the Greek finance minister said on Friday.

The figure given by George Alogoskoufis made the Games by far the most costly in the 108-year history of the modern Olympics.

Greece may retain the expenditure gold medal for many years to come as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is scaling down the size of future Games, starting with Beijing in 2008, to make them more attractive to bidding cities.

"The cost of the Games is expected to reach 8.95 billion euros," Alogoskoufis told reporters after meeting Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis.

"There were massive over-runs...this investment is big but all Greeks should be proud (of the Games' success)."

Alogoskoufis said while not all figures were final the state paid the lion's share of the bill, or about 7.2 billion euros.

The figure means the Athens Games costs far more than their 2000 predecessor in Sydney, Australia where spending ran $140 million over the budgeted US$2.6 billion.

Alogoskoufis said the total figure also included the balanced 1.7 billion euros budget of the Games organisers but did not include the cost of other infrastructure projects that were completed before the Games.

"This does not include the construction cost of projects completed or sped up to be ready in time for the Games," Alogoskoufis said, referring to the capital's three-year-old airport, a major ring road and a new tram line.

The IOC, though, considered both the tram and the ring road as crucial Games projects and repeatedly urged organisers to speed up work.

HUGE DELAYS

The former socialist government, which lost elections five months before the August Games to Alogokoufis' conservative New Democracy party, had insisted earlier this year the total cost would not significantly exceed 4.6 billion euros excluding the budget of the organisers.

But years of delays in construction and a huge rise in the security budget dramatically inflated the cost.

As an example of the spiralling costs, the security budget for the first Games since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States rose from a projected $125 million in the 1997 bidding file to over $1.2 billion.

Years of double and triple construction shifts to catch up with schedules further increased costs.

Alogoskoufis said Olympic infrastructure projects cost 2.8 billion euros, Olympic sports venues and equipment another 2.1 billion, security stood at 1.0 billion euros while athletes' hospitality and environmental projects set organisers back another 1.1 billion.