When you play a sport, any sport, especially one as unglamorous as TT, it requires a different life. It has to go from being a sport, or a few hours of freedom, into your whole raison d’etre.

I’ve never been to Japan but Nobelist Kazuo Ishiguro is perhaps its most engaging tourist guide: The man who narrates intolerable despair with an equally intolerable restraint.

We send our contingent to the Olympics for honour. But what our athletes bring back home is glorious hope.