Olympics 2008

There was a moment last Saturday - I think it was when England's cricketers started to make a routine run chase look like the Marathon Des Sables - when I felt myself slipping into tabloid mode.

We'd been thrashed by New Zealand at rugby in the morning, were in the process of losing to the same country (population 4.3m) at cricket in the afternoon and didn't even qualify for the football tournament that I would be watching later that evening.

Our three most popular team sports - sports we gave to the world - and we are rubbish at them, I ranted to nobody in particular. And it is Wimbledon next week, I banged on, that's always a depressingly accurate barometer of our sporting prowess.

We talk a good game, we stage a good game, but we certainly can't play a good game. With that I went to bed, convinced we should just stick to things we're good at, like nettle-eating, shin-kicking or queuing.

But in sport, as in life, tomorrow is another day. And come Sunday my Daily Moan mindset had passed, Britain's athletes were on their way to victory at the European Cup, our rowers were sealing a second successive World Cup and our amateur boxers were dominating the European Union Elite Championships.

So there we had it in one weekend, the British sporting paradox: we're good at sports we don't seem to care about, and decidedly mediocre at ones we go on and on about.

What a shame that is, and not just because it leads to mass hand-wringing, doom-mongering and radio phone-ins.

On Tuesday my colleague Gordon Farquhar overdosed on happy pills and shared his newfound love for the 2012 logo with the world. Well, today it is my turn to drink deeply from the Kool-Aid.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next dominant force in Olympic boxing. Cuba, all those ex-Soviet republics, the US of A, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, the British are coming and it starts in Beijing.

First, some numbers: two, two, one.

That's the sequence of boxers we have qualified for the last three Olympics - a process that has got much harder since the Soviet Union, a boxing superpower, splintered.

Here are some more numbers: 13 but only two in the last 52 years.

That's how many Olympic boxing golds we've won. The last time we won more than one boxing medal of any colour was when we claimed three bronzes at the 1972 Games. For five Games in a row, between 1976 and 1992, we came home with a single bronze. We won nothing in 1996 before Audley Harrison struck gold in 2000 and a 17-year-old Amir Khan landed silver in 2004.

So why, some of you might be wondering, all the big talk about British boxing?

Well, this time we've qualified eight boxers. So we've gone from a one-teen band to a squad of proven medal winners in the space of one Olympic cycle.

Last year a young British squad went to the world championships in Chicago and returned with a gold - our first ever in this competition - and two bronze medals.

Birmingham's "Fabulous" Frankie Gavin was the man who claimed that first and he is the undisputed star of this tightly-knit bunch.

A former sparring partner of Khan's, the 24-year-old has been part of the elite set-up for seven years. The last two of those have seen him emerge as one of the most exciting fighters this country has produced.

Cannily kept back from the 2005 Worlds by GB head coach Terry Edwards, Gavin's talent first blossomed at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.

Gold there set him on course to Chicago, where he handed Russia's reigning Olympic champion Aleksei Tishchenko his first defeat in four years. There was another gold medal for Gavin at the weekend and a "boxer of the championship" accolade.

But he wasn't the only British success in Poland (the team won four golds, three silvers and a bronze - this was achieved without even using the two fighters who won bronzes at the Worlds, Joe Murray and Bradley Saunders) and he isn't the only story in GB's Olympic boxing team, not by a long shot.

Team captain David Price, a 6ft 8in plumber from Liverpool who went to the same school as Steven Gerrard, won the super-heavyweight division, while Billy Joe Saunders, the youngest member of the team at 18, added a gold to the rave reviews he's been getting since being fast-tracked into the senior squad.

Saunders' story would make for a decent biopic. Raised on a travellers' site in Hertfordshire, "Billy the kid" comes from a long line of bare-knuckle fighters - his grandfather never lost a contest and his great-grandfather was a champion in fairground fighting booths.

He is also something of a Billy the kidder. At Wednesday's squad announcement, Saunders was a blur of good-natured energy, mugging for the cameras and teasing his team-mates. In fact, they were all good-natured and energetic, and the time they have spent at their Sheffield base and on the road has clearly brought them together.

They were also refreshingly confident in their abilities and chances of success. More than one member of the team told me he was going win in Beijing and then defend that gold in London.

As coach Edwards put it: "We don't fear any opponent but we show them respect. In the past we probably used to show them too much respect and we feared them. Not anymore."

He also told me this is the most talented group of boxers we have sent to a Games for decades but the group being developed for London are even better, so keep buying those lottery tickets.

And it is talk like that, backed up with performances when it counts, which makes me think Gavin, Murray, Price, the two (unrelated) Saunders, James DeGale, Tony Jeffries and Khalid Yafai, are going to return from China as the most successful British Olympic boxing team since we won five medals in 1956.

I think that's probably more than enough unfettered flag-waving and giddy optimism for one day.

No doubt next week I'll be back telling you how much of a lottery the Olympic boxing tournament is and if Amir Khan had faced Mario Kindelan in the first round instead of the final he would be going to Beijing as an unknown amateur on a team with a reduced budget.

But hey ho, that's sport.