You can tell when an Olympics is coming to an end, and that’s when the Gymnastics Gala occurs. And today marks the closing straight as we have had 213 medals awarded (with 89 medals left be awarded) and I always find that during the Gala (as has happened today) there is a time when our minds cast forward to the next Games. But before we do that, let’s concentrate on the results from today and for the small nations it was a very mixed bag indeed. And nowhere was this demonstrated more than in the Men’s 200m. Bolt from Jamaica did the sprint double (winning both the 100m and 200m) and for Martina of Netherlands Antilles who was denied a bronze by less than a hundreth of a second, he got a silver. That was until several hours later when IAAF (the regulator of athletics) made the following observation:

“In a bizarre footnote to the scorching race, both of the apparent minor medalists - Churandy Martina and Wallace Spearmon - were eventually disqualified for lane violations”

But as I noted at the start of these Games, the moral of the Games is the taking part not the winning (but if you are reading this Martina, I’d happily e-mail you a picture of a Beijing silver medal if you would like me to)