EUROPEAN MEDAL RUSH MEANS NOTHING.

After a few days, the European Athletics Championships have ended and Great Britain & Northern Ireland (why not 'The United Kingdom' ?) has topped the medal table with 12 golds, ahead of France; whatever has happened to Russia and Germany ?

This was GB's best performance at a European championship and one has to admit that some of the performances were good. However, Europe is not the world and the excessive enthusiasm with which some of the successes were greeted by television commentators is a little questionable. 'Incredible', 'fabulous', 'unbelievable', 'wonderful', 'superb' and so on are words used by television reporters with such alarming regularity that they have become meaningless; actually, they need to invent some new words as they've used up all of the ones currently available to describe achievements of previously undreamed of heights. None of the performances actually required such excessive praise as the likes of Bob Beamon, Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson, Usain Bolt and many others can give testimony to. Greg Rutherford is now the Olympic, Commonwealth and European long jump champion without ever coming within a couple of feet of the marks achieved by Beamon, Lewis, Mike Powell and a number of others. Is Rutherford really a great long jumper ? Is he simply the best of a poor bunch or were the 'super-jumpers' of the past all on drugs ? Who knows ? The only genuinely world class athletes that we know we have are Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis - their performances have been repeated and at world level.

Of course, the achievements of our athletes have been good but no where near good enough to deserve the ludicrous hyperbole heaped on them by the television bunch and general media world. What happens as a result of all of this silly nonsense is that our expectations are raised. Come next year's world championships and the 2016 Olympic Games, we'll all be expecting our athletes to be leading the gold rush; not a chance with the USA, China and all of the African nations taking part. There'll be a few medals and, with luck, a gold or two, but to hope for more is ridiculous. For those who present our sport to build up hopes in the way that they regularly do is to do a disservice to our often very, very good athletes; let's be honest and start out by expecting nothing. That way, we'll be surprised and gratified by every little improvement, personal best, season's best, national record, and, yes, medal.

For us to do anything else is childish and pointless.