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. You need to walk the city streets and sit in the halls and the stadiums to understand the mind-scrambling immensity of it all. The Games in Rio have 10,500 athletes competing for 300-plus medals in 42 sports. There are two species, including horses, three sexes, including geldings, and Mark Todd, aged 60, was taking part in eventing for New Zealand — and that’s the most dangerous sport of them all. The Olympic Games are about the biodiversity of humankind — and the universality of the sporting impulse.

How does it feel? What does it mean to you? The overwhelming questions of the television reporter. I’ve often talked to contestants in the Mixed Zone, that area of razor-elbowed scuffling from which that curious thing, a quote, can be found. But it’s generally only the telly people who ask how it feels.