Perhaps the UK-focus is not altogether misplaced as we are doing so well in these Games, with (as I write this) Team GB lying second in the medals table. A bit of national backslapping is probably in order, that once again this minnow is outcompeting some whales.

I love the Olympics. I love sport. Yet there are always moments during my hours transfixed before the screen that the thought flits across my brain that it is all a little childish. Jumping into sandpits and chasing other people round in circles on a bike is what I used to do when I was eight years old. Perhaps not childish, but childlike is better. Childish is pejorative, childlike is good. Childlike is the opposite of cynical, tired, adulthood. It’s the attitude that is eager to try – that is unembarrassed about running and jumping and tumbling.

At the Olympics this childlike activity is pursued to the point of perfection, which makes it sublime. There is a sense in which the sublime childlike activity of elite sport is where we see man at his most god-like. It is why sport matters, and why it so transfixes us: it points to a heavenly reality, that one day we will all be Olympians. And that means each evening I sit on my sofa with tears in my eyes.