29-17-19-65

It was all going so swimmingly. Right up until the last few seconds when the numbers stood at 29-16-19-64 there was still a hope that there would be balance, some kind of even-ness to their beauty. After all, all it took was one of the numbers in either column one or three to jump across (not that this was likely) and there’d be a perfect set of even numbers (either 28-16-20-64 or 30-16-18-64) and the statistics could rest easily for all time in their even-tempered symmetry.

Then, at the aptly named eleventh hour, column two got an additional number and chaos was allowed to reign, and, because it was the very last opportunity, that very chaos was going to reign forever (or at least until the disqualifications start to roll in - they have been known to take back medals a decade later, you know...). All four rows of odd numbers that sent a chill right to the very heart of this observer who now knew that whilst everything had come together spectacularly well for the team (and jolly well done to them for that), the numbers were not going to be happy.

They never are when they’re forced to be steadfastly “odd” and the numbers… well, they do not lie.

Happily, the Olympics in London managed to pass by with very little in the way of hitches despite the doom and gloom predicted even during that miserable first few days when the seats remained almost as empty as TeamGB’s medal-wins column. For myself I was, of course, never a fan, and managed to avoid the event for at least a week before being tempted to take a little peek at a tiny bit of rowing.

I think perhaps that I was full of fear. With the announcement of the “win” back in 2005 came the devastating tragedy of the bombs the very next day and, because I am a very nervous sort, the kind who is easily terrorised by fear (and, if they make you change your lifestyle then it seems that they do win…), and also because I am a very poor soothsayer (any predictions made in these pages are hardly likely to provide “Nostradamus-like” ructions three centuries hence), the whole notion of a “world event” happening in my country in this political climate quite frankly terrified me.

As we can now see, nothing that bad actually happened. The Games have been consigned to history and we can all relax and get on with our lives.

History is, in the end, what these things tend to be about. We can of course celebrate our victories and achievements at the time they happen but it is in the crucible of time passed that most things are eventually judged. “How can Rio top London?” Well, in exactly the same way as London “topped” Beijing and Beijing “topped” Athens, and so on, and so on.

As people, we very much live in the “now” and find that whatever is going on right this second must somehow be “better” than anything that has gone before simply because we are experiencing it and it has the heartbeats and pulses of people who are alive right now and not just on some old videotape or picture book.

But history is an unforgiving dictator. In fifty years or so, many of those athletes we have so recently enjoyed getting their successes will be very much the same as the elderly folk who were recently dredged up from the last London games in 1948 by those investigative reporters seeking yet another “angle” and who then got looked at in a very peculiar way by the forward-looking, youth-oriented media, as they implied time and again that they were a veritable “Who’s that?” of once household names... and considering the impossible notion of how it could be even plausible that these old and unfamiliar faces had once been great athletes and well-known names and were now almost so very forgotten...? How, they implied, could this possibly be...?

History is, after all, about the big names and players of the game. We recall the Alexanders and the Napoleons and all but ignore the rest of the population apart, perhaps, from their numbers. They are destined to be little more than the “thousands” in an army, or the “tens of thousands” of victims of an epidemic and little more, except, of course, to those they were once known by, who also fade into obscurity in time’s unforgiving furnaces. 99.99% of all of the people who have ever lived seem to live their entire lives and die without anyone really noticing they were ever there. Series like the rather wonderful “Horrible Histories” seldom talk about anyone other than the well-known figures of the day and the lives of ordinary people are only tackled in the most general way (unless of course they achieved a “stupid death”) because that is, unfortunately, the way of things. Armies may consist of thousands of the great unwashed, but it is the Generals who get remembered or those who make an exceptionally brave choice and are awarded a medal for doing so.

Medals again, you see…? Medals seem to guarantee at least a line in the history books to prove that you were once here. This is why we can see the appeal of getting a medal at the Olympics. Suddenly you’ve done something. Suddenly you can have your moment in the spotlight when the whole world is looking at you and knows your face if not your actual name. Suddenly the world knows that you were once alive and the very best at doing whatever it was that you did in your glorious moment in the sun.

Because fame is a fickle beast. Most of us fail to realise that names as “world famous” as perhaps Madonna or David Beckham will eventually fade back into obscurity. Many of the most well-known and almost universally adored faces of early Hollywood movies who were at the time absolutely the most famous faces on the planet, people like Mary Pickford, or Douglas Fairbanks, or even more recent ones like Cary Grant, can just extract a look of bafflement when presented to later generations nowadays. It is a very rare person indeed who survives to become an “icon” for more than one generation, and, more often than not, this is because their “talent” (or perhaps their “notoriety”) was snuffed out far sooner than even they might have expected it to.

It may be difficult to imagine a world where no-one knows who David Beckham is – or was – but it will happen far sooner than you think, as it did to those massively famous Victorians who once had the world at their feet but whose names now mean absolutely nothing at all; Sarah Bernhardt, Little Titch, or General Tom Thumb. How many could pick out their picture now with that much certainty…? But once upon a long ago, each of them had the world at their feet.

So, my friends, seize your moment in the spotlight, embrace it and enjoy it. Enjoy the fact that people will see your face and know who you are because one day this too shall pass and the spotlight will shine somewhere else and someone might very well be asking “whatever happened to” you, or come calling at your lonely door having been told that, yes indeed, the old man or woman living down there in the basement flat once ran faster than anyone else had ever run before, “but you wouldn’t know it to look at him now, would you…?”