Olympic report

WHAT'S HOT AND WHAT'S NOT AT THIS YEAR'S GAMES

HOT

First and foremost: all our gold medal winners. My God, they're going to be handing out a few gongs in the New Year's honours list, OBEs at least, and some are surely up for knighthoods and dameships (if that is a word)
As for Lord Coe, well, they haven't made a commoner an earl since Harold McMillan was made the Earl of Stockton in 1992. I'd have said "Gamesmaster General" could be next in line. As for Boris, he's done so well they may sack David and install him as PM right now, if vox pop had anything to do with it (which fortunately for the now rather overweight leader, it isn't)
Michael Johnson. A legendary figure who is also intelligent, articulate and extremely well informed. Like.
Brendan Foster. One of our national treasures, even though he never won a gold medal, he's still an iconic (sorry) figure in British athletics, and is a first rate broadcaster too. He knows whereof he speaks, and tells us beautifully and with restrained, but infectious enthusiasm. Like a lot.
BMX biking. BMX to conventional cycling is a bit like snowboarding to alpine skiing. The competitors are young, cool and talented, just like the snowboarders, and the sport adds a new and highly enjoyable dimension to the Games as a whole. Great stuff.
10K swimming. Absorbing television, one wonders why this hasn't been part of the programme before. And it offers another example of the increasing emancipation of women in sport: they make the girls swim as far as the boys. And they're not far behind either...

NOT HOT

John Inverdale. He's like that guy down the pub who's in the quiz team and is unbearably smug because of it. He's a rubbish interviewer and generally a poor journalist. Dislike.
Denise Lewis. Here at least we have a genuine athlete who has competed and prevailed at the highest level, but as we have seen with Sally Gunnell, and even more disastrously, Kathy Freeman (remember when she was taken on by the BBC during the Sydney games, only for it to emerge that she was so thick they had to get rid of her within a couple of days?), a good athlete does not necessarily make a good broadcaster. She can drone on and on with an endless series of self evident facts which seems acceptable to the Beeb, but hello? She's broing, she's dull and they should get rid of her now.
Colin Jackson. The great Welsh nearly-man is OK in small doses, but all this exposure has gone to his head a bit and next to MJ, again and again he is to be found wanting.
TaeKwondo and judo. Two martial arts that have no place in the modern games. TKD is supposed to involve blows with the hands as well as the feet- OK, have you ever seen a single punch even launched, never mind land on target? It's just 2 opponents dancing around a ring trying and nearly always failing to kick each other in the head.
Judo is 2 opponents grabbing onto each other's lapels and then stumbling around seemingly for hours on end until one of them makes the other fall over. Spectator sports they ain't, and like it or not, that has to be a criterion for inclusion in a modern games.
Synchronised diving. Don't get me started.
Rhythmic gymnastics. It isn't gymnastics, it isn't circus; what the hell is it?
Football, tennis and (at Rio, allegedly) golf. Sports that have huge, global showcases, the World Cup, the grand slams, the majors, don't need to be represented. Leave em out, I say. If not, we could be seeing moto-cross, eating contests and even (and this is not so far-fetched, considering the enormous clout of the big players in that sport), Formula One. God help us...
Women's boxing: You've come a long way baby, but was it a road you really wanted to go down? I accept that boxers are bona fide athletes, but as a doctor I have always had a problem with a sport where rule 1 is: induce brain damage in your opponent. Men are naturally violent and aggressive, and they will always fight one another when the opportunity arises. But women are in a way more highly evolved beings: they solve their problems in more thoughtful ways. And to see women becoming (judging by what we've seen at these games) as violent and committed to inflicting harm as men, is to this observer at least, a bit disturbing.