Wednesday 1st August 2012

And day 5 of the games; still no sign of any athletics happening, but pretty much everything else is underway, and Britain now has 4 medals, but no gold. I watched the swimming last night to see Michael Phelps win another silver and gold medal to become the most bemedalled Olympian ever with 19 of them including 15 gold. He is now to retire after three Olympics at the age of 27.

The British ladies beat Brazil 1-0 in front of over 70,000 fans at Wembley to cement their place at the top of their qualifying group and go on to face Canada in the knock out round.

Today’s line-up.

09:24 12:40 Judo Quarter-finals

09:24 13:20 Rowing Final

12:25 16:35 Cycling - Road Time Trial

13:25 16:25 Canoe Slalom Final

16:25 19:25 Gymnastics - Artistic Final

16:50 21:55 Football Preliminaries

And our big chance of a gold is in the time trial cycling where Wiggo takes his yellow jersey and swaps it for a team GB lycra body stocking and hopefully will come in first, as he is the best at time trialling; but we said something similar about Cav on Saturday didn’t we?

Another scandal hit the Olympics last night, as four of the men’s double badminton teams played each other and tried to lose therefore avoiding each other in the quarter finals. The umpire as livid, brandishing the disqualified black card about, but the games did finish amid boos coming from the sell-out crowd. And today all four pairs were kicked out of the games.

In football, in the Champion’s League, we have to sit through ‘dead rubbers’ at the end of the group stages as teams don’t really have to win. And we even heard discussions during the Euros that England might look to finish second to avoid a better team. Seems like this is not allowed in badminton, and especially in the Olympics, and this has been treated very seriously indeed, and even drew comments from Lord Coe, who has taken a Darth Vader like presence behind the games.

If only all sports took gamesmanship so seriously, the we would have no cheating, diving, swearing, arguing with officials, tackles from behind, handball or the other ‘professional’ tactics that we have seemed to accept as part of modern sports.



And I can reveal that Britain has won its first gold medals; Helen Glover and Heather Stanning won the women's pairs in rowing, and Sir Bradley of Wiggins of Sideburn Castle romped home to win the individual men's pursuit gold too. What a glorious golden day it has been for Britain, and Britain jump from 22nd to 10th in the medal table. But we're not counting, are we?

Oh yes we are.