Olympic Euphoria Boosts Team GB Athletes
Updated: 3:01am UK, Saturday 04 August 2012
Day seven completed in London, and Team GB already has 22 medals.
When Britain's Olympians flew back from Beijing in 2008 with an excess baggage of bronze, silver and gold, only eight of them had been won by this point in the Games.
It took the rowing double act of Heather Stanning and Helen Glover, quickly followed by Bradley Wiggins - a cycling alchemist who turned the yellow of the Tour de France jersey to pure Olympic gold in just 10 days - to really put the show on the road on Wednesday.
But we should never have doubted that London 2012 would turn out like this. For the power of a home Olympics, witness the heptathlon.
Will Katarina Johnson-Thompson - just 19-years-old - ever forget the moment she was introduced to the 80,000-strong Olympic Stadium crowd? How could she?
She mouthed 'wow' into the camera as that throng roared its approval of a young Liverpool Harrier who was about to compete in her first Olympics.
She covered her mouth and then remembered that she was here to compete and had to re-compose herself. She did so admirably, and brilliant for one so young.
It carried her into the competition on a wave of patriotic euphoria she could hardly have imagined on her path to these heights, via the cold, open athletics tracks of Merseyside and beyond.
And look what it did to Jessica Ennis too.
A seasoned athlete was almost blown off her feet by the reaction to her from that crowd.
Little wonder that her next action was to whistle down that track as if 10 flights of hurdles simply didn't exist.
"The fastest 100m hurdles ever by a multi-eventer," said the commentators, "a British record."
Ennis will have waited for this moment, but she cannot have calculated the unknown benefit of home support on this scale, and at this volume.
The morning heats at an Olympic Games are usually witnessed by spectator numbers dwarfed by the contingent of athletes and officials on the track and infield.
This was different, and extraordinarily powerful if you are willing to use its energy.
On the rowing lake, where there were 30,000 spectators, there has been no more welcome sight than a sportswoman finally getting what she had worked 12 years and more to achieve.
Katherine Grainger had set sail on her Olympic odyssey in Sydney in 2000, collecting silver.
She did so again in Athens four years later, when gold was what she yearned for.
When four more years of toil were rewarded once more with silver in Beijing, who would have blamed her for taking the hint and moving on?
But Glaswegian Grainger didn't move on. She stuck at it.
She hung on until London 2012 and nailed it, alongside Anna Watkins in the double sculls at Eton Dorney.
"Always the bridesmaid," she'd reflected ruefully in Beijing. Not now.
The Olympic movement compels its members to go faster, higher, stronger. Grainger holds to those principles, and so too Victoria Pendleton. No time to mope over the spilled gold of Thursday's is qualification alongside Jess Varnish.
She got back on her bike, and rode the keirin on Friday evening like her life depended on beating her nemesis, Australian Anna Meares, to gold. And she did. Emphatically.
She thought singing the national anthem atop the podium would staunch her tears. But she cried buckets of joy up there, and we choked a little with her.
The Olympic spirit is no lie. It is here all around us, turning Boris Johnson into a high-wire circus act and reducing the Prime Minister to gleeful cheerleader while Wills, Harry and Kate seem delightfully intoxicated by the whole affair.
London 2012 didn't exactly creep up on us. It was seven years in the making. But what it has done in the capital city in the space of just seven days, from opening ceremony to world record-breaking British men's pursuit cycling, is quite possibly beyond anything that was predicted.
And I fancy we ain't seen nothing yet.
