Suzanne Harrington: Watching talented people excel in their field is a thing of such joy

What we really learned from these Olympics is how confidence and ability are the most gorgeous combination on Earth

Gold medalist Kellie Harrington celebrates after the Women's 60kg Final during the Olympics. Picture: Richard Pelham/Getty Images

It feels like we have learnt a lot from the Olympics, and I don’t just mean our growing awareness of the armies of middle-aged men sitting on sofas in their pants, shovelling in crisps while shouting at the impossibly perfect super-humans on the telly to do better. (TV pitch: as a warm-up for the 2028 Games, gather all these armchair athletes, dust off the crisp crumbs, and put them through the 800m freestyle, the high jump, the bar gymnastics, the skateboarding, the rock climbing, the relay. Defibrillators at the ready, medals for anyone who doesn’t die less than halfway through.)

No, we have also learnt that there are a lot of overnight Christian-identifying art critics (like overnight oats, but harder to swallow) with considerable gaps in their classical art knowledge. Unable to tell the difference between Renaissance renditions of ancient Greek gods having a banquet versus their own deity having supper, they became considerably het up, screaming blasphemy in a country where robust secularism is baked into its constitution.