Beijing Olympics: What lessons can we learn from Britain's gold rush?

London House can be found in Beijing’s bar district, alongside places called Sip and Purple, drinking dens so Westernised they might well have been airlifted in from Shoreditch.

Slick and sharp, all minimalist fittings and designer script on the menus, the venue has acted as a night-time haunt for the British during these games, a little Notting Hill home from home, a place where you can happily forget you are in China at all.

On Thursday, after nearly a fortnight of Olympian precision and perfect time-keeping, 14 days in which you could set your watch on the departure of your bus, or the start of the second heat in the women’s 75kg Greco-Roman wrestling, London House was hosting the only function in Beijing that was running late. Boris Johnson was in town, scheduled to address the media about London’s plans for the 2012 Olympics.

The mayor was due to begin at 5pm, and by 5.30pm there was no sign of him. Bustling PR people fluffed around oozing self-importance; administrators from the LDA or the BOA or LOCOG or any one of the alphabet soup of organisations running London 2012 talked anxiously on their mobiles; a worried-looking Sloane with a clipboard checked her list to see if he might have slipped in unnoticed. And as you watched and waited, you thought: if only British sports people could be put in charge of 2012, if only Rebecca Adlington, Chris Hoy and Ben Ainslie were running the thing, all would be well. Because these are people we can rely on.

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