Team spirit

Sometimes it is all about how you look at things, as was made clear to a clean-living accountant who had helped old ladies across the road, given generously to charity and even found something nice to say about George Osborne. When he shuffled off the mortal coil he found himself sharing a heavenly cloud with an old crone. Peeved when on the first cloud they passed he saw Saddam Hussein sharing a duvet with a gorgeous blonde he put in an official complaint to St Peter. ‘Ah, you just don’t get it,’ he was told. ‘He is her penance.’

I, too, may have been looking at something from the wrong angle. I was hooked by the Olympics, and not just by the extraordinary combination of talent, courage and intelligence in running that puts Mo Farah so high in the athletic pantheon. I found myself absorbed by the niceties of keirin tactics in the Velodrome and enthralled by the intricacies of the dressage arena.