Medal for those who think outside the vox

LOVED that swimming but what a relief to get out to Eton Dorney at the weekend.

Nothing to do with the way they went in the pool, everything to do with their performance poolside. It wasn't so much the tears or the way some of them confused getting a silver with the Somme and a bronze with World War III. Indeed, we could have handled more crying and gnashing of teeth and even the odd expletive might have been forgiven.

Instead most of the tadpoles stuck to the script, the one composed of platitudes, cliches and a vocabulary straight out of a PR handbook. Once again, the swimmers in Team Australia (as we like to call the Olympic squad these days) said the same things, in the same way. The girls in particular shared a breathless pitch that made them hard to separate. As programmatic as our Prime Minister in front of a camera.

In contrast, out at the lake, the guys formerly known as the Oarsome Foursome spoke Australian when they made no secret of the fact that being beaten by Team GB was not the game plan. They were having a very ordinary moment in Buckinghamshire and it showed. The good news for the future of viewer sanity was that they did not sound like the swimmers and indeed, did not sound like each other. No mean feat given they work as one on those oars.

Even triathlete Erin Densham, who could well have been a candidate for Swimspeak, given that she's a female of a certain age, proved to have a voice of her own after fording the Serpentine, and cycling and running endlessly around Hyde Park. It's hard to put your fingernail on it but you get the feeling that if she has had media training, the kid from Camden has taken it with a grain of salt.

Now that we're getting ready for a forensic post-mortem of sports policy to see if we can up the medal tally and catch Team Uzbekistan in Rio it might be worth reviewing the way our athletes are encouraged to be carbon copies of each other in the presentation stakes. Drilling swimmers on intonation as well as their fingernail-to-the-wall techniques might have made sense to the marketers a few years back but, like other elements of our Olympic strategy, it may not suit the times. Even your average five-year-old has figured out how to behave in front of a TV camera these days so it's the Olympians who don't look as if they're in The Truman Show who are really worth gold.