Here we go then.

Today’s Daily Telegraph splash, “I’ll be racing drug cheats”, was not the umpteenth and suddenly surprising instalment of the Peter Costello saga, but rather an all-too-predictable softening up yarn paving the way for Tamsyn Lewis’s inevitable eviction from the Beijing Olympics medal quest some time before the quarter finals of the women’s 800m.

At athletics we suck, which is presumably why the majority of television you will watch between now and the end of the Beijing Games will be in some way connected with the fortunes of brave Aussie boys and girls in the pool. Which is both a pity and a lost opportunity. If there is anything more tedious than televised swimming it’s probably swimming on radio.

Both are to be avoided in the lonely quest for a civilised existence. Here we go then. Games wall to wall, and the focus will not be on the great opportunity of Olympic competition — exposing a momentarily attentive and curious audience to the eccentricities of fringe sports and their arcane mysteries — but rather slavishly dwelling on the events in which Aussie gold is on offer. Here we go. Splash.