“They know they’re on the road to glory,” cried the excitable Garry Herbert, as our boys in the coxless pairs, George Nash and William Satch, nailed their heat in the lake at Eton Dorney.
Meanwhile, our boys in the cycling road race had caught a crab. We’d been led to believe, or perhaps led ourselves to believe, that a team containing Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish only had to hit the saddle to bag a gold medal for Cav, the Manx Missile, but by the time they got to Box Hill, an agitated Hugh Porter behind the microphone was implying the unthinkable.
The GB riders were five minutes back in the peloton, and thanks to the Tour de France, we all know what that means.
By the end of London 2012, we will understand lots more sporting terms. Not least of the pleasures of the BBC’s wall-to-wall coverage is the opportunity it affords for immersion in unfamiliar events. In fact an Olympic parlour game suggests itself: match the commentary to the sport.
“Big pull through the flick,” for example. Any idea? It was the men’s artistic gymnastics, just as “nice counter and block” referred to the women’s individual foil which, if you need further clarification, is part of the fencing.
Peterson was the Canadian, who knocked out our own Anna Bentley in an extra sudden-death minute. Who, apart from Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, knew that fencing ends in sudden-death?
Until yesterday I was a stranger to the women’s individual foil, and yet I felt Bentley’s defeat like my dog had died. The Olympics does that to you.
I’d never watched archery either, before I watched Team GB crash out, beaten by the Ukrainians. The commentator, incidentally, was Eddie Butler.
A rugby man, talking crossbows at Lord’s? It was almost as disconcerting as watching Serena Williams and Jelena Jankovic on the sacred Wimbledon turf, in red and blue.
By mid-afternoon I was exhausted, having given heart and soul to 17 different sports, including a handball match between Russia and Angola that seemed to have no commentary at all. Maybe there comes a point when even the BBC runs out of commentators. I’m sure Terry Wogan would have done it.
The other reason for my exhaustion was that, like 6.9 million of us, I’d stayed up for Friday’s extraordinary Opening Ceremony, choreographed by film director Danny Boyle.
In last Tuesday’s final episode of the BBC’s brilliant spoof documentary Twenty Twelve, plans were unveiled for a ground-to-air missile display at the Opening Ceremony.
But the real thing was actually more spectacular than that, although nothing made me prouder to be British than the bursts of comedy, notably Mr Bean on the Chariots of Fire keyboard, and Daniel Craig’s 007 double-act with the Queen.
Who, one wonders, had to go first to Her Majesty with the suggestion that she might pretend to leap out of a helicopter? At any rate, if any knighthoods are dished out when the whole shebang is over, perhaps Boyle should be at the top of the podium.
“It was fantastic it just got a bit boring when the athletes came on,” said my wife, as eventually we climbed the stairs to bed in the small hours of yesterday morning, and there was some truth in that, although it was nice to see the team from the Federated States of Micronesia have its moment in the sun.
The parade is worth following every four years if only to discover countries you never knew existed. And, of course, for the pleasure of listening to the BBC commentary team, supplying facts about countries that they never knew existed, either.
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