Olympic thoughts

Thanks goodness: it looks like being a great success, as it should, given the huge cost, over £9 billion. There is something thrilling about seeing highly skilled and trained people performing at the very edge of what is possible in their discipline. Much is made of the gold medal winners, but even the also rans are among the world's best, and their levels of performance are beyond what most people could achieve.

Much has been made of Team GB's performance, and it certainly is gratifying (and exciting!) to see them doing so well. Yesterday's winners were a fine array of multi ethnic UK, with a red headed young man from Milton Keynes, a beautiful mixed race woman from Sheffield, and a lithe dark skinned 10k metres runner from Somalia. All are British and to judge from the twiterati, are a poke in the eye for the late and unlamented Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' predictions.

The effect of Team GB's successes also highlights the effect of sporting success on national identity and cohesion, not just in order to demonstrate superiority and might (as appears to be the Chinese approach), but to help a diverse nation, such as GB and the USA, to establish an internal shared and transcendent identity.

Let's hope that the good feeling/good will wave that is being generated will contribute to a legacy of harmony and an enriched sense of 'Britishness', as well as to one that replaces the media focus on trivial talent with one that gives more attention to excellence achieved through a combination of dedication and hard graft. Who knows, it just might also lead to a legacy of active sports participation across a wider section of Britain's increasingly obese population.

Meanwhile, I would welcome a bit of linguistic development: the poverty of the vocabulary employed to describe Olympic performances is truly depressing. Aside from the over use of 'deliver', there is the repeated and almost exclusive use of 'amazing' and 'incredible'. Whatever happened to such adjectives as exceptional, astonishing, magnificent, wonderful, splendid, superb, breathtaking, outstanding, superlative, unrivalled, momentous, etc., etc?