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You worry about Paula Radcliffe in these conditions wheezing away like a rusty bike. And I recall my favourite British athlete of all time the mighty Steve Ovett reduced to the sort of breathlessness only experienced by the adoption agency for Brangelina by the rotten air of Los Angeles.

Still everything else in China seems to be working fine and even the journalists feel like they've got a little bit of room to breathe - even though breathing is rather difficult there right now.

So we await the opening ceremony - the bit where organizers waste the most money and the world gasps at how many fireworks can be let off in half-an-hour.

Most opening ceremonies these days are a little bit short on class and a bit long on contributors.

There'll be a lot of small kids dragooned into some sort of frighteningly slick choreography that makes you worry for their futures.

My daughter used to be involved in a local jazz dance club in Stockton-on-Tees and you've never seen so much uncoordinated lard in one place, bless 'em. (Not my lass of course, who has pondered long and hard between them two options that British teenagers struggle with these days - fags or food - and she's gone for the former.)

Still there were bags more charm in seeing a bunch of lasses doing their best than a bunch of seven-year-olds looking like they've been pre-programmed with the insertion of a microchip in the back of their skulls.

Eighty leaders of state are there too, none of them too keen to mention Chinese domestic policy and all of them happy to do their share of bowing and scraping.

Bush had a little pop of course - in Thailand, and while he's a total irrelevance any road so it doesn't much matter what the bloke says, Brown's gone to Suffolk but he's going turn up at the closing ceremony to pick up the keys for the next one.

Not quite sure where that puts him in terms of his position on the whole thing. Between a rock and a hard place, I suppose but he's probably getting used to that by now.

In the meantime the British Olympic team (not Team GB, please God I'm going to bite my way through all the hardwood furniture in our house if I hear that phrase every two minutes) have already lost a boxer cos he couldn't make the weight.

Frankie Gavin is devastated but it's a shame he wasn't a little more emaciated. The bloke really only had one task going into the Games, that's to weigh less than 60 kg.

Someone, not least himself, has effed up royally. Jockeys go on drastic weight loss regimes as a matter of course which is how they can arrive at the big meets weighing about the same as a finger puppet. My daughter says the bloke was clearly not smoking enough but then she's pretty keen for Amy Winehouse to release a book on nutrition.

The other decision that has slightly bemused me is giving Mark Foster the flag. I tend to agree with Kelly Sotherton - give it to someone who's won a gold medal.

Foster's a top lad, obviously, and the fact that he's competing at 38 is impressive enough. But Great Britain's strength and depth is plain for all to see: Bradley Wiggins or Chris Hoy should be at the front of things.

The cyclists are going to be the Fort Knox of Britain's efforts and so you might as well reward them early. In fact I'd like to see the cyclists being employed by Britain's energy companies when they get back.

If you hooked up that Rebecca Romero to the National Grid you could power a small village and reduce your carbon footprint in no time.

Come to think of it that tiny whinger Katie Melua banged on about there being nine million bicycles in Beijing - rig em all up to the electric, get the underemployed to pedal like bloggery and that's the smog gone in a couple of days, isn't it? Why don't people think these things through, eh?

The other contender would've been the bloke Ben Ainslie, although it's less easy to see why that bloke is so good cos when you watch highlights of the sailing you can't see what anyone's doing so it's hard to get a grip on it.

Plus there's all that obscure stuff about jibbing your spinnaker and tacking to the leeward side of the fo'c'sle which just leaves me confused. Still Ainslie's won two gold medals in the last two Olympics which is achievement enough to give him the flag.

I've got nowt against Foster, it just seems odd that you give the honour to a bloke whose most significant Olympic contribution was to insist on wearing his own lycra and getting ditched from the team by Bill Sweetenham.

Still,the only bit of the opening ceremony that really counts is the athletes' parade, all of them utterly chuffed to their very bits to be there.

Who will be this year's one-man team? some obscure Pacific island's flag held aloft by a cross-eyed archer or a twenty-stone sprinter? It doesn't matter much. It's just marvellous to see.