Apart from an abiding passion for rugby, I’m not a massive sports fan but I do like to take a good dip into big sporting occasions when they dominate the TV schedules and I’m patriotic enough to get quite excited when the national side(s) do well. So the Tokyo Olympics, despite coming hard on the heels of football and tennis’s big moments, has had a fair bit of my attention.
It’s been pointed out by some commentators that the Olympics is an opportunity for people to get wildly enthusiastic about sports they otherwise wouldn’t care about – as Eddie Izzard puts it, you don’t often hear people saying “What time is the dressage on?” – but I’ve noticed another phenomenon: the development of armchair expertise.