Legacy of London 2012 is one that has sold Britain’s fitness short

This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the London 2012 Olympic Games. It is customary here to suggest that decade has simply flown by, that the years have passed in a blink. In reality this already feels like an event from a different timeline altogether.

It’s not the actual Games, which will remain a wonderful thing, tenderly guarded. It’s more the staging. Looking back there is something jarring about the uniformly joyful and empowered response to the opening ceremony, with its ragbag of nostalgia and self-mythologising. Kenneth Branagh pretending to be Brunel. Musical Youth playing croquet. Roger Moore inside a phone box surfing dial-up internet porn. Fiona Bruce and Dizzee Rascal reciting the shipping forecast on top of a giant cheddar cheese.

It felt strange at the time that these images of the past, a kind of John Betjeman acid dream, were seen as a confident new reimagining of Britishness; that the future was now wide open, that we would all now speed off towards that horizon on a Union Jack Vespa.

And a decade on that show feels like a jumble sale of end-of-empire odds and ends, a nation chucking the last of the Regency dining chairs on to the fire for the entertainment – check that VIP guest list – of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Robert Mugabe.

It turns out the immediate future would not be 50,000 nurses breakdancing to Elgar, but something closer to George Michael’s difficult new material. The future would be a Games that ran hugely over budget, whose legacy isn’t first-rate facilities or an end to the obesity and participation crisis.

Zoom out a bit and the most tangible legacy of 2012 is the career acceleration of Boris Johnson, the kind of politician who would steal Judi Dench’s Olympic skiffle board