Golden Games for Britain

From the viewpoint of 2012, the success of our team is perfect. Our Olympiad begins this Sunday and the whole country can look forward to what we will achieve.

We had the chance of going out on a high in the athletics with Phillips Idowu starting as favourite in the triple jump and I'm hugely disappointed it didn't come off for him.

The conditions worked against him because it was cool and the wet slowed the track down, which was a setback for him as a speed jumper. It developed into a bit of a dogfight between Phillips and the Portuguese Nelson Evora who, in the end, was a bit too strong for him.

Phillips can be proud of what he has achieved, especially considering the way he came back at Evora in the third round. It is something he has never done before, as he has always won his competitions in the first two rounds.

It's a long four years but I'm sure he will be back in London. I won a silver medal in Atlanta in 1996 aged 30 - a year older than Phillips is now - and came back in Sydney to win. Phillips has said he is disappointed with silver but he has to recognise that four years ago in Athens he got nothing when he could have won a medal. What he achieved here could be the making of him.

There is no doubt, though, Christine Ohuruogu has already arrived and her 400 metres gold medal was one of the highlights of the Games so far.

It has inevitably put the spotlight back on her missed drugs tests and critics have wondered whether she should be an ambassador for London 2012 but I have no such doubts.

She will be warmly welcomed, as you could see when Seb Coe gave her the flowers at the medal ceremony. Everybody within the sport understands the issues with the out-of-competition testing system and it is so easy to miss a test. You are equally likely to catch an innocent athlete as you are a guilty athlete through the way the out-of-competition testing system is run.

People outside the sport do not realise how easy it is to miss a test and I have no doubt there was nothing malign behind Christine's case, as is shown by the British Olympic Association lifting the lifetime Olympic ban on her when she appealed. After the race she gave a television interview which I thought showed a beautiful innocence and naivety which I would judge is not capable of the deception you need to cheat.

With the benefit of hindsight she may have shown a little more contrition. But she won the world title and was suddenly faced with this barrage of vitriolic journalism not based on the facts of what happened. She was profoundly bruised by that experience and is now understandably guarded.

One of the surprise packages of Team GB was Tasha Danvers winning the bronze in the 400 metres hurdles. I didn't see that coming - I was expecting her to fade badly in the home straight, as she has the last two times she has competed in an Olympic or world final.

I was among those who said Tasha should stay at home and Perri Shakes-Drayton, who beat her in the Olympic trials, should go to Beijing. Perri, who is 19, represented the future and she needed the experience that would serve her well for London 2012. Tasha had suffered from a virus but she told the selectors she was in good shape and they got it right in picking her. She ran it in a personal best of 53.8 seconds and when I saw her she was calm - it didn't come as such a shock to her as it did to us. It was a truly great performance.

As I said earlier this week, I had a hunch that Usain Bolt would break the 200m record. I heard that he had come in for some criticism from Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, for not showing enough respect in the way he celebrated his 100m and 200m wins.

I did a bit of fist-pumping after a big win and Bolt is a breath of fresh air. He has broken the 200m record into a wind, off the back of rounds in the 100m and 200m, and he has restored credibility to a sport tainted by doping - the importance of which cannot be overstated. The Olympics need to capture the imagination of younger people and that is a fundamental tenet of the London 2012 philosophy and something the IOC bought into when it awarded the Games to London.

My boys at home will look at Usain Bolt doing his hair beforehand, celebrating afterwards and doing the dancing and they'll love it. He just got carried away in the moment and why not? What he has achieved here is phenomenal. He is the athlete of the Games.

He is such an incredible talent that the 400m could even be on his radar too - he ran around 45 seconds as a teenager. He's got the endurance and with that stride I would hate to think what he could do to the 400m record. However, he couldn't manage a triple of 100m, 200m and 400m as the amount of heats in the Olympic timetable would not allow it.