• Many people may have doubted Usain Bolt, but the Americans never did. While 2bn people around the world watched the event live on TV, the US broadcaster NBC chose to show it later. Presumably to give Tyson Gay and Justin Gatlin enough time for a head start.

• He's the face of the Olympics. No, it's not Bradley Wiggins or Mo Farah, it's Boris Johnson, the man who has managed to get more screen time than any athlete over the past 10 days. On Monday morning he turned up on Radio 4 to lecture the nation on how the Olympics are restoring a sense of morality to the nation. "There was a culture of easy gratification and entitlement and all the rest of it," he told the Today programme, while talking about last year's riots. If anyone knows about easy gratification and entitlement, it's our Bozza.

• If you were in any doubt that there is a pecking order of events within the Olympics, just check out the whereabouts of John Inverdale. Having anchored the outside broadcasts of the rowing last week, Inverdale has skipped off to the Olympic Stadium, leaving Rishi Persad (who?) to replace him at Eton Dorney for the canoeing events in which no one in Britain is that interested. Unless we look like winning a medal. Meanwhile, on Sunday night Inverdale and Colin Jackson went head to head at the 100m final, to see who could wear the jacket with the most hideous piping. Presumably after having gone clothes shopping with Ian Thorpe.

• Security has noticeably slackened off at Weymouth. On Sunday at the sailing, everyone caught trying to enter the Nothe spectator area with an umbrella larger than 30cm was treated like a potential terrorist with an offensive weapon. After many complaints, the regulations have now been relaxed so that spectators can bring in any sized brolly as long it fits inside their bags. No mentions of just how large a bag you are allowed, though.

• All pretence at impartiality is now officially over. When the Belarus athlete Ekaterina Poplavskaya crashed out of her first heat in the 100m hurdles after 40m, you could almost hear the indifference as Colin Jackson said: "Four years of hard work, bless her." When the Jamaican hurdler Brigitte Foster-Hylton came to grief in her heat a few minutes later, Jackson and Denise Lewis reacted as if there had been a death in the family.

• The Aussie-baiting continues. Having concluded it was probably a bit de trop to mention yet again how many medals we have got compared to the pitiful Aussie haul, Hazel Irvine adopted the even more patronising approach of comparing the Aussies to the Kiwis. "Just look," she said. "The New Zealanders are in 14th place with three golds while Australia are 10 places lower with just one gold."

• Very little at the Olympic Games goes unsold. Long gone are the unmarked buggies to go and collect the javelins from the centre of the stadium, and in comes a fleet of mini Mini Coopers thanks to the sponsorship of BMW. It makes you think of the commercial opportunities that have been missed. Watching the women's marathon on Sunday, I was surprised to discover the route did not include several run-through McDonald's, rather than a few trestle tables masquerading as the athletes' feeding station. Still, there's plenty of time to sort this out before the men's marathon on Sunday.

********

• The whole world wanted to chat to Usain Bolt on Sunday night after the 100m. But the only person Bolt wanted to speak to was Mel C of the Spice Girls, whom he asked to pose for a picture with him later that evening. Just think: not only the world's fastest man but the world's only man who can instantly recognise Sporty Spice.

Excuse of the day: after being expelled from the Olympic Games for testing positive for marijuana, the US judoka Nicholas Delpopolo said he had inadvertently eaten food that he did not realise had been baked with the recreational drug.

Lingowatch: Tkatchev – a move named after the Soviet gymnast Alexander Tkatchev in which the athlete releases him/herself from the high bar and flies back over it backwards. Otherwise known as the reverse hecht. Please do try this at home.

Contributor

John Crace

The GuardianTramp

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