Usain Bolt proves London 2012 wasn't all an Olympic dream

WAS it really 12 months ago that the whole city, the whole country, the whole world went through a dream of sport?

Usain Bolt

WHAT have the Olympic Games ever done for us? A pertinent question, I thought as I picked my way along that well-walked path through the ghastly shopping centre towards the Olympic Stadium for the Sainsbury's Anniversary Games last night. Was it really 12 months ago that the whole city, the whole country, the whole world went through a dream of sport, sampling every experience from despair to hope to sweet, sweet victory? And all based around this once-desolate spot in East London?

And was I really there to chronicle it? I must have been, I have the cuttings to prove it, but still, like Alice, I'm not sure whether I dreamt it all or whether someone else did. Reassure me: it did happen, didn't it? I'm not just having the same dream about the same place again, am I? We did all share the summer of all sporting summers last year, did we not?

Usain Bolt was there last night, just to tell us it was all real. He ran the 100 metres and it brought it all back. He made his customary leisurely start but then the old rocket-heels started rocketing as of old, and in his own time he went past the field.

Once he's standing up there's still no stopping him: he finished in a thrilling 9.85 seconds and looks once again like the man to beat at the World Championships in a couple of weeks. Bolt may be Jamaican, but he's also a Londoner: and London, once again, showed its love. Bolt's back, and only fractionally less than the speed of light. I was back too. It really did all happen.

I sat there when the meeting began, looking at the track to see if the scorch-marks left by Bolt's feet were still there 12 months on and whether the panther-tread of David Rudisha could still be discerned, and searching for the precise spot where Jess turned into a muscly version of the Mona Lisa and where Mo first showed us he was faster than the West wind, and I tried to come to terms with the Olympic revisionists having already started their pernicious work.

It wasn't that great, was it? And even if it was, what was the point? It's all over now, and we can't eat memories any more than we can eat dreams. Where's the legacy? Where are all the children that were supposed to take up sport? Why is all Britain not taking part in organised sport? What are all these sports facilities really for? Can we have our billions back, please?

One of the eternal truths of life - journalistic life anyway - is that anything that is (a) very good indeed and (b) part of the recent past must be condemned as soon as possible. The Harry Potter revisionists are telling us that all those riveting books were in fact frightfully dull, just as they told us in the 1980s that the ideals of the 1960s were fundamentally unsound. Peace and love: who wants that crap?

There's an Olympic legacy all right, and I'll get it out of the way right now, but before I do so, let me point out that legacy isn't the point. Legacy is great and even important, but it's just a bonus. Some of it is stuff we're exploring right now: seeing what we can do with the sporting hardware and the wave of joy that rolled over the country last year.

It's also important that a place that was a s***hole dominated by a fridge mountain is now a nice park dominated by a stadium, and that the surrounding area where people actually live is now quite a nice place, especially if you like shopping centres.

Less tangibly, the bounce of last year's British sporting success has been found this year in the Tour de France, at Wimbledon, on the cricket field, at the US Open golf tournament, on the rugby fields of Australia, in the dressage arena: in just about all sports save international football, which has its own problems.

All the same, sod legacy. Oops, Olympic blasphemy that, and written in the Olympic Stadium to make it worse. But I mean it. Reader, have you ever had an idyllic summer love affair? Of course you have, stupid question. It ended, of course it did, you had to go here and the other person had to go there, but it was wonderful and mad and funny and sad and tender and beautiful and glorious and uproarious and you were mind-bogglingly happy and you wept when you walked away knowing it was not supposed to last longer than the 33rd of August.

Do you now ask what that love affair ever did for you? Do you tot it up: I'm a little bit wiser, I'm a little bit more understanding, I know more about myself, I visited some interesting places, I appreciate more deeply the value of love, I now know how to have better and longer relationships, I have some nice memories and it was all good experience?

Or do you say that was the great summer of love, I loved every sodding second of it and I thank God I was alive and living and loving? Nothing else matters: long live love and long live life.

That was my summer of 2012, and I bet it was yours. Don't let anyone take it away from you.