Olympics

Neither Tom Daley or I ever talked about winning a medal in the 10m individual platform competition and I'm very proud of the way he dived in the final.

He raised his game from the preliminaries to the semi-final and then raised his game again.

He'll be the first to admit that he was not on top of his game in the final, but he finished seventh and there are good things to take away from the Olympics.

Obviously there are things to improve on as well, but most importantly, he competed with a smile on his face and he goes away smiling.

Great Britain might have owned the Laoshan Velodrome and Michael Phelps the Water Cube, but down here at the Bird's Nest, it's been Jamaica all the way.

The sprint events at these Olympics were billed as a straight battle between the USA (population 303m) and the Caribbean island (2.8m).

Battle? It ended up as an almighty spanking. At the close of play, the scoreline read USA nil, Jamaica five.

Beijing

At around 8am on Saturday morning, a pack of Britain's young canoeists gathered at the National Sports centre at Bisham Abbey to watch Tim Brabants power his way down the flat water of the Shunyi lake.

The (remaining) champagne had been on ice since Friday, when Brabants became Britain's first ever Olympic gold medallist in the sport.

"In the first two strokes there was no doubt I was going to win. No-one was going to come past me, I felt fantastic," he'd said after his win over 1,000m and hopes were high he would become team GB's fourth double gold medallist at this Games over the 500m course.

Sadly, he was out-paddled to the gold in a thrilling finish ("you could throw a doily over the three of them" according to Ben Dirs, our text commentator on duty at the time).

But he did pick up a bronze to make sure the sport exceeded its 2008 medal target of two (Brabants' pair plus slalom silver for Aberdonian David Florence), to cue more corks popping among his fellow paddlers.

And it's not just because Brabants is apparently "one of the nicest, most humble, self-effacing elite athletes you could meet," according to Anne Ferguson, U23 development manager at the British Canoe Union.