I’ve been paying a bit more attention to my Apple Watch exercise rings again recently, and although I usually work on a week by week basis, I was perusing the history in the accompanying iPhone app. There, you can see how you’ve done each month and it’s also a good way of comparing days, ie. seeing if you often take Fridays off. I was surprised, however, going back a couple of months, to see a trend I hadn’t really noticed at the time.

I wasn’t expecting much from this Olympics, I’ll be honest. It felt like there was no way Team GB could live up to their amazing performance at the home games in London, there was so much talk of drug cheats and athletes being banned, several athletes opting not go due to potential Zika/health problems, and on top of all that the concerns that Rio would be able to pull it all off without a hitch anyway.

The Winter Olympics drew to a close last night, with one of those closing ceremonies that include about ten minutes of fireworks. I don’t get fireworks at all. Anyway, the games themselves saw two weeks of triumphs and controversies and tears and flowers, and all sorts of stuff. I really didn’t get to see as much of the games as I wanted, but unlike the London 2012 fortnight, in which I wrote off the rest of my life in favour of solid TV viewing, I couldn’t afford to hand over too much of my time to Sochi.

Whilst my previous posts on this subject have been bullet point notes of things that have stood out for me, I can’t do the same for this one. Already, the specific details are beginning to fade from my brain, and we’re only one day post-Olympics. Mo was brilliant, obviously. There were some great final moments in the modern pentathlons, weird as they are. Tom Daley’s diving on Friday was fantastic, not just because he got the medal, but because the overall standard was so incredibly high.

As with my previous post, here are just some random thoughts from the last few days of competition. The Men’s 400m final was brilliant. Not only were there twins in the race, but they crossed the line at almost exactly the same time! They came 5th and 6th and were just two hundredths of a second apart! Of course, you can’t talk about brothers without mentioning the Brownlee duo who finished the Men’s Triathlon in gold and bronze positions.

With the Olympics taking over everything, I thought I’d spare five minutes to note down some thoughts on what I’ve seen so far. These are just scrabbled notes, not arranged in much of an order, Opening Ceremony Highlights Rowan Atkinson’s moment of glory was fabulous. The ability of one man to captivate what turned out to be an audience made up of 26 million is so good. I’m sure there are people that don’t and didn’t like him, but I thought it was perfect.

There’s just a day or so left before the 2012 Olympics gets underway (or if you’re a football fan, they already have!) and I’m excited! I’ve only really got into the Olympics over the last couple of games, I paid more attention at Beijing than I have before, and I’m really looking forward to watching as much as possible this year. It helps that we’ll have day by day threads on Sidepodcast, so there will always be a place to chatter about what is happening, and it also helps that the BBC’s overload of coverage means you’re unlikely to be able to miss anything.

We all know that when it comes to design, the 2012 Olympics seems to be a big ball of fail. Eh-hem. We’ve had a while to get used to that pink and green disaster, though. The latest addition to the 2012 branding line-up was the mascots. Firstly, I didn’t know there were Olympic mascots anyway. Is this just a host country thing? Why do we need mascots? Secondly, they’re quite scary.

Apparently I am suddenly interested in lots of different sports. I vaguely remember watching bits of the last Olympics, just because it was on, and I was bored, and I liked TV. This year, I actually seem to care how well we do. This is a weird development for someone who hates sport, and I don’t like it. The BBC page is brilliant, of course, with live video and an automatically updating commentary.

We went to a country fete today, and it’s very heart-warming to know that people do still leave their houses for things other than football, the pub or shopping. Some parachutists flung themselves out of a plane, and I got a headache from straining my neck towards the sun so long as we watched them descend. There were also Morris Dancers, but let’s not get on to that subject, eh?