I WAS a never a sporty type. It's hardly surprising.

My hand/eye co-ordination is decidedly iffy, fancy footwork is alien to me too, I'm really not much of a team player and, worse still, I lack competitiveness.

The fact is that most of the time, when it comes to games, I really don't care much if I win or lose.

I'd rather win, of course, but frankly it's no big deal.

At school, I quickly decided that it probably wouldn't be wise to reveal this lackadaisical attitude.

The psycho of a sports master was forever looking for victims.

A fat boy called Ashley who couldn't run the cross country without collapsing in a gasping, spluttering, heap was his current psychological punch-bag.

I wasn't about to offer him an alternative. So I shouted for the team and punched the air in triumph when we won and hung my head in supposed misery when we lost.

In reality, winning a match or whatever, though pleasing, never felt spectacularly good and losing really didn't seem that bad.

This might explain why I am left relatively unmoved by Britain's undoubtedly astonishing achievements in the Beijing Olympics.

While I salute our medal-winning athletes and have nothing but admiration for the hard work, discipline and commitment that has gone into their extraor-dinary performances, I really can't get too excited by an event that seems to be driven entirely by politics and money.

Athletes seem just pawns in a giant game of international strategies.

The Olympics used to be about personal achieve-ment and excellence.

At one level it still is.

But it is also about massive sponsorship deals, behind-the-scenes negotiations involving long-term targets, dodging the doping scandals, stage-managing the spin and even controlling the weather.

Meanwhile, it appears that some of the competitors lead existences that seem frankly appalling.

Take American gold-medal-winning machine Michael Phelps, for instance.

His eight gold medals may be more than anyone has taken home from a single games before, but at what cost?

To achieve it he has to had to swap any semblance of normality for a life that consists of nothing but eating, sleeping and swimming.

In order to fuel his almost superhuman energy levels he has to shovel 12,000 calories into his body each day.

What he eats is not only astonishing in terms of quantity but mind-bogglingly bad in terms of nutritional content.

Take his breakfast for instance. A huge bowl of porridge, three fried egg sandwiches on doorstep-sized slices of white bread smothered in fried onions and mayonnaise, followed by a five-egg omelette, three chocolate-chip pancakes and a couple of rounds of French toast.

Add to all this, 1,000 calories of energy drink, lashings of olive oil and loads of extra sugar and you have an idea of the sort of abuse he's putting his body through to deliver those medals.

It just can't be worth it.