Creatures of a day! What is anyone?

I can’t be the only person for whom half the pleasure of the Olympic Games is in reminiscing about previous Olympic Games.

What happened, and where we were and who we were with when it did. ‘Can you remember that time when… ?’ ‘Ah yes, we were on holiday in Cornwall the year that…’ ‘Was that 1992 or 1996?’ And so on.

My earliest Olympic memory is from the 2000 games. At age eight, I was watching the canoeing while eating my breakfast (it was in Sydney, you’ll remember, so they were several hours ahead) when my mother came in to tell me than my hamster had died. Unscarred by the experience, my siblings and I went on to play the Sydney 2000 PC game for years afterwards, furiously tapping the arrow keys alternately to get our athlete around the running track. It was cutting-edge stuff.