Did you watch the Olympics and Paralympics this year? Awe inspiring, wasn’t it? British athletes did the nation proud: second and third in the tables…and for a country our size. We must be brilliant. As a former athlete I have an idea of the work taken to get to a reasonable level. In all honesty, if our international athletes leap tall buildings in one stride I was only good enough to make some interesting scratch marks on the privy wall.

But, what I remember with the fondest memories, was when I was running well. It didn’t actually matter whether I won or not as long as I had done what I set out to do. In fact there were some hollow victories and some really invigorating losses. I have picked the name of Inflow Performance because a few times in my life I have experienced being ‘in the flow’ and it feels wonderful. I can still remember vividly running at the RAF Championships in 1992. I was in pretty good shape, but the RAF’s number one 400m hurdler, Greg Dunson a good friend of mine, was in a different league. He’d had to work hard to catch me up along the back straight and as we hurtled round the top bend I realized I was running absolutely flat out. It felt so good. The following year another friend of mine, Jeremy Clifton, cheered himself hoarse as the Exeter University 4 x 400m relay team finished third at the universities championships in Edinburgh. How we savoured the ‘victory’ as we trundled home in the team minibus.

During this year’s Olympics I was listening to one of those Jeremy Vine discussions on Radio 2 where two opposing views try and sound as bigoted as they can. A journalist was arguing that anything other than first place was a waste of time. “Why was the country spending so much money on losers?” he was asking. His opponent asked him how many journalistic awards he had won. None of note came the answer. It set me thinking. There are some countries, Scandinavian ones for instance, where people talk about the quality of life being really special. I can’t remember those countries doing that well at the Olympics.

Simon Shama the historian argues that powerful armies are vanity projects for the ruling elite. Is an all-conquering Olympic/Paralympic team similarly a vanity project? It was, after all, suggested that the London Olympics would have a lasting legacy leading to a fitter nation and reduced NHS burden from fitness related illnesses. Why, then, did I read with dismay, ironically during this year’s Olympics, about the planned closure of our local swimming pool due to lack of funds?

We play because we once needed to practise the rough and tumble of life as foragers and hunters. Our bodies get flushed with endorphins when we ‘commit sport’ and oxytocins when we bond with others. It really is the ‘taking part’ that counts. It’s true that some, mostly extraverts, reportedly ‘bond’ with their opponents as fellow competitors, but introverts prefer to bond with team members and there are more introverts in the world. Could it be that ‘aggressive competition’ (win at all costs) is a heuristic (looks the right answer but doesn’t bear scrutiny) for ‘friendly competition’ (having a focus, a reason to play and a way to end a game)? If that’s the case, are we really better off having highly paid sportsmen and women ‘bringing home the silverware’ rather than taking part ourselves and, more importantly, just being the best we can be?