London 2012, 10 years on: wrestling with a sporting legacy built on false assumptions

And what a time it was, and what a time. What a deeply – looking back now, almost exactly 10 years on – unutterably strange time. If the London 2012 Olympics had a moment of optimum energy, a thermal peak, it would be 9.46pm on Saturday 4 August in the swooping eves of the Olympic Stadium.

At 9.02pm Jessica Ennis had crossed the line to take gold in the heptathlon, sending a first surge of heat and noise barrelling around the stands. At 9.24pm Greg Rutherford was confirmed as gold medallist in the men’s long jump, adding another geyser burst to what was by now a state of unceasing uproar.

Finally, with the air pitched to a feverish rolling boil, Mo Farah came storming down the vulcanised back straight in the men’s 10,000 metres, sparking waves of resonance, energy, flares, people in the seats whirling and leaping, fanned to a state of unplanned emotional priapism.

In the middle of this something startling but also, somehow, completely normal happened. Two rows of seats at the top of the main stand had been filled with nurses and Royal Navy sailors dressed for the occasion in pristine tunics and cinematic white frilly suits.

As Farah crossed the line the nurses and sailors spontaneously embraced, caught in a moment of full-on VE-Day abandon, as though the flag-draped fever dream of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony – 5,000 spitfire pilots breakdancing to Elgar; Paddington Bear singing Let It Be inside a giant cheddar cheese – had unexpectedly come to life. And in that moment it seemed that everything was good and fine and well and would always be; that this was the start not the end of something.

At which point wind chimes tinkle, the screen dissolves, and it is necessary to peer back down the time tunnel and wonder how that