Don't get me wrong, but I greet the end of every Olympic Games with a heartfelt sigh of relief. Of course, as a sports junkie, I love the competitive endeavour, outstanding athleticism, rousing if meaningless jingoism and, best of all, the heroic failures (what, Paula Radcliffe has messed up in the marathon again?). But what I really cannot stand during the fortnight or so of the Games is the willingness of apparently normal people to talk utter gobbledegook. Even my wife has been affected. "Yes," she hooted triumphantly over breakfast. "Gold in the Yngling. Now keep your eyes on Ainslie in the Finn." I nodded indulgently, vaguely wondering if Ainslie in the Finn was an indictable offence. Later, a reasonably sane friend of mine opined that while he was "delighted with Smith's bronze in the pommel, he really needs to work on his dismount and develop a much more extensive repertoire by 2012". And this from a bloke who, a few days earlier, would not have known a pommel horse from a seaside donkey. It has been the same everywhere with people spouting off enthusiastically and knowledgeably about sports which, for three years and 11 months out of every four years, they have absolutely no enthusiasm for and very little knowledge of. Be honest: how many of us will get enthusiastic about an archery competition, dressage event, judo bout or beach volleyball final until we do it all again in four years' time? (Actually, I was kidding about beach volleyball. Apart from a few, overly tanned young men and women in California, nobody ever gets enthusiastic about beach volleyball). Because Team GB did well in the rowing, sailing and cycling, a nation was glued to its TV sets when these events were on. But when the world championships in these same sports crop up next year, the audience will be about as large as that at a Gary Glitter "welcome home" concert. Worse, perhaps, is that many feel moved by events in Beijing to recall their own heroic endeavours in these sports: the time, for instance, they took a sailing dinghy out of Brighton beach in the teeth of a howling Force 3 breeze. Or the occasion they cycled, virtually non-stop, the 12 miles from London to Romford, pausing only for a hearty lunch. I guarantee that virtually none of these people will intentionally sit down to watch another rowing contest or cycle race until 2012. Even with athletics and swimming, TV audiences in most parts of the world are minute most of the time. You can have the world's finest athletes on display but if there is the umpteenth re-run of The Guns of Navarone on another channel, we all know which one is going to draw the crowds. Except, of course, at the Olympics, where we not only watch the long jump final and 100 metres freestyle but get absurdly hooked on obscure, minority sports because our latest national hero - whatever his or her name is - has a shot at getting the bronze. Perversely, really popular participant and spectator sports such as football, baseball and tennis fail to get the juices flowing at the Olympics. And they do not even bother with a golf competition. Yet as irksome as I find it when people bang on about how unlucky so-and-so was in the skeet shooting, I confess to being sucked into it myself. Last weekend, myself and few chums went to Lord's to watch Essex demolish Kent in the final of cricket's 50-over competition. But we rushed back to the TV screens to gawp at the British squad take gold in the final of the coxless fours. And we just had to forsake the cricket again to see Usain Bolt cruise to victory in the 100 metres, marvelling at how fast he ran, not to mention how much faster he could have run had he really been trying. And it will be Bolt who will provide me - and an awful lot of others, I suspect - with the abiding memory of these Games (the British victory in the Yngling notwithstanding). Maybe that is wrong. Perhaps it should be Michael Phelps's extraordinary achievement of winning eight golds that should stick forever in the mind. Or any one of dozens of other faultless performances by young men and women who strained every sinew to become, for a while at least, the very best in the world at their chosen sport, even if I had never heard of it before. But it will not be. It will be Bolt, just as it was Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson and Seb Coe before him. However much we enjoy seeing someone doing well by bashing about a shuttlecock or by jumping a horse every four years, it is invariably on the running track that the truly memorable Olympic moments occur. Maybe it is because it recaptures the true spirit of the ancient Olympics or, more likely, because it represents that most basic human, competitive instinct: the desire to run faster than someone else. So we will remember Usain Bolt for his supreme ability, his scintillating speed and the fact that winning a running race is a heck of a sight more comprehensible than the rules of the cycling Madison. @Email:sports@thenational.ae