Olympic Notebook

How strange it is to be watching the Olympic Games on television. No wonder people have such rum ideas of what the whole thing is about. This is the first time I’ve watched the Games on telly since 1984; the next seven times I was in the city of choice, working for a newspaper. My first Games was Seoul in 1988 and it was there I became a sporting Galileo. I realised that Great Britain was not, after all, the centre of the Olympic universe, around which everything else revolved. No, we were just one satellite among 200 or so. Perhaps I should have been excommunicated. The man from Mars — the one who settles debates in sixth-form common rooms — would conclude from the BBC coverage that the Olympic Games was a contest between Britain and the rest of the world. That’s what comes from looking at the Games through a keyhole.