Steve Ovett was a guest on Olympic Breakfast yesterday and I don't know what this legendary runner thought he was playing at, but for some reason he decided to introduce to the proceedings a degree of reality.

This strange misunderstanding of his role occurred during a discussion about the medal chances in the men's 1,500 metres of Andy Baddeley. Now, Ovett has been in the sport long enough, surely, to appreciate that the business of the invited guest on the BBC's sofa-heavy morning show is gently to stir enthusiasm for the day of television that lies ahead by mildly floating the possibility of further British medals, and then to sit back and enjoy a cup of coffee from one of the white mugs provided.

We can't begin to imagine, then, what possessed him, after Baddeley had been carefully built up with a pre-filmed interview, to dig right in and declare: “He's good, but to be perfectly honest, he's not good enough.” We merely mention, at this point, that Baddeley's prospects had been openly touted in advance by one Lord Coe, and we leave it to you to wonder at the extent to which old rivalries can die hard.

Anyway, compounding this offence against BBC etiquette, Ovett's mobile phone then exploded into life in his pocket. “That'll be Baddeley,” Adrian Chiles suggested. Ovett at least had the decency to switch off the phone; although, on the kind of form he was in, it would have surprised no one if he had answered it, silencing Chiles and Hazel Irvine with an outstretched palm and shouting, “All right, mate? Yeah ... No ... I'm on Olympic Breakfast. Where are you? ... Did he?”, and so on, for three minutes at least. As it turned out, Ovett was right about Baddeley. He didn't get a medal. Even so, there's a time and a place for this kind of thing, and Irvine's sofa, we would politely suggest, is not it.

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In a confusing few hours for expertise, Dame Kelly Holmes had recently offered viewers the following analysis of Pamela Jelimo, the 18-year-old Kenya 800 metres prodigy: “She just runs.” This insight, Dame Kelly seemed to imply, was based on a number of pre-race interviews given by Jelimo in which she openly stated: “I just run.” And that, in itself, seemed to accord with any quantity of breathless post-race declarations we have heard coming from the Bird's Nest stadium, in which victorious athletes have beamed and said: “I just gave it everything I had.” (In other words: “I just ran.”)

One could be forgiven for assuming, on this evidence, that the work of coaches in the creation of Olympic champions has been wildly exaggerated. At any rate, when Chiles proposed the theory yesterday that “it's between the ears as much as the legs”, it sounded like over-elaboration. And who said that what was between the legs had anything to do with it, anyway?

Elsewhere, our recently declared belief that there is no such thing as a bad triathlon was bolstered by the men's race, won by Jan Frodeno, of Germany, after a lung-incinerating sprint. And our spirits were further buoyed by spotting, during the cycling section, a fan (possibly Swiss) dressed as the Devil. Our fear had been that the freelance devil worship that traditionally accompanies outdoor cycling events in Europe had been eliminated by the Beijing organisers, along with imperfect children. True, in this case, the devil was seated, rather than menacing the riders with his trident, in the approved Tour de France manner. But it was reassuring to think that plastic horn-wearing is tolerated to some extent in the new China.

Adjourning to the kitchen yesterday, I heard, above the noise of the kettle, a familiar tone. It couldn't be, could it? It was. It was Eddie Butler. Was this the long-awaited moment when the Welsh rugby man, turned ad hoc voice of archery, revealed his next Beijing event? I sprinted back to the television, setting, incidentally, a world and Olympic record over that distance. Disappointingly, though, it was just another film package to which Eddie had loaned his rich baritone. A shame. But it can't be long now, surely.