Every four years around this time, antipodeans develop a passion for demographic mathematics, pointing out, for example, that New Zealand has won one gold for every 1.7m head of population. 

This kind of medals-per-capita reasoning has helped them to best, or “bist” as they like to pronounce it, Australia in past Olympics, but this time our haul is so huge that we’ve got one gold for every 1.4m Australians — for those playing at home, you just take our total population, minus a few people we don’t like to count any more, like Rupert Murdoch and Lynton Crosby, divide it by the number of golds won, and voila. I’ll save you some time and point out that Great Britain has one gold for every 5.6m Brits. Piddling.

Three golds in one household

We’ve got so few people, in fact, that we’ve had to achieve multiple golds from single households, with Jess Fox grabbing two in the canoeing and then watching her sister, Noemie, take another in the women’s kayak cross.

Elsewhere, fast bowling legend Mitchell Starc’s brother, Brandon Starc, who also had a high-profile role in Game of Thrones, was competing, less successfully, in the high jump.

Honestly, I’ve always thought that Prince William was punching above his weight, perhaps thanks to the amount of gold in this throne room, but no one punches as far above their tiny nation’s heft as Australia.

While it is deeply delightful for us to be sitting in third place on the medal table, frustrating the French (13 golds), destroying the seemingly sporty Germans (a lousy eight) and, vitally, humbling South Africa (just one), some victories are just so much sweeter than others. 

Silver-polishing Poms

Winning gold in cycling’s men’s team pursuit would have been pleasant no matter who we’d beaten, but sending the Poms to polish their silver made it far more fabulous.