It was 2012 and, now I look it up, actually my birthday, and I was having a standup row with an American journalist because the Australian Anna Meares had just won gold in the women’s cycling sprint event. Let me count the ways in which the Olympics had driven me mad. First, gripped by a patriotic fervour that even Kemi Badenoch would probably have found a bit much, I was enraged that Victoria Pendleton had come second. Enraged. I hated Australia, I didn’t understand why American journalists were even allowed to watch the proud sportsters if they weren’t going to root for the British ones.
Second, I was incandescent about the injustice of an adjudication, on a rule that I’d only learned five minutes before. Pendleton had crossed a lane line, which is forbidden, yet it looked like Meares had pushed her, then the judges said Meares hadn’t, then the race was redone, then Meares won, and five-minutes-ago me didn’t even know you were allowed a rematch, but now I was the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of cycling tort and I wanted to put Meares in prison.
Third, it was my birthday and I hadn’t even noticed, whereas on any regular year, the whole of August is given over to either countdown to or aftermath of this momentous date. Fourth, I later tried to make the case that cycling was the most democratic of all the sitting-down sports (no normal person has a horse, or a boat, or a kayak, or a canoe, yet any normal person can have a bike); sitting-down sports were the most sportsmanlike (citation still needed on this); Great Britain was the best at cycling, duffer judges notwithstanding; ergo, we were the true ground zero of democracy. I seriously thought that.
In theory, then, I know that from the opening bars of the opening ceremony, my brain will be boiled and I will be thinking batshit things and saying them out loud until it closes. So far, I have got wildly excited by Keir Starmer being the only spectator to have packed a cagoule, from which I made some wild inferences about British politics: that we were ahead of the neo-fascist curve hitting Europe and the US, a model of planning and common sense, and some day soon everyone else will catch up. Previously, before the cagoule, I thought the exact opposite.
I have summoned genuine hot tears for the silver medal of breaststroke star Adam Peaty, after all his personal struggles, about which I knew nothing at all and had to look them up on Wikipedia while I was patriotically standing up. I’ve sucked my teeth at the Mexican synchronised divers, muttering “Now that wasn’t exactly splashless, was it, lads?” and shouted “NINE ON EXECUTION, NINE ON SYNCHRO, SUCK THAT!” as Tom Daley and Noah Williams hit the water, sounding for all the world like a person who knows their way around a diving board, as opposed to what I am: a world-class physical coward who has never jumped off anything higher than a pavement edge and doesn’t like getting wet.
In normal life, I would be full of disrespectful questions, such as how is Tom Daley still so cute after all this time, and isn’t it great how many sporting giants are also called Williams? Today, they are the nation’s lions, and chitter-chatter is for traitors. I know nothing at all about why Kazakhstan is suddenly so good at fencing (they just are, OK?), or Uzbekistan is so good at judo; I don’t really understand volleyball as a concept (there are just so many more efficient ways to move a ball from one place to another), yet here we are, and I am the most invested person ever.
The Olympics are well known for fostering a spirit of global togetherness, and that is great; well done, athletes. But the armchair expertise, the deep well of totally imagined knowledge, the phantom athleticism, that’s the bit I really miss when all the medals are in.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
