With a few honourable exceptions Irish sport has punched well below its weight in Beijing and the root causes of our perennial shortcomings run deep

LAST NIGHT David Beckham put an end to the anguish of those behind the Find Little David Now campaign. The world's most important person came out for the quiet seclusion he craves and sang to the world. In painstakingly acquired Mandarin David warbled a few words about togetherness and harmony. "Easy for you to say, Goldenballs", we muttered.

The last day of any Olympic celebration always manages to feel the same as its predecessors. The hosts are tired and teary with pride and sentiment. Lots of athletes and no few journalists of the fan-with-a-laptop persuasion are gambolling about the place filled with beer and that sappy sort of up-with-people feeling they will feel embarrassed about by Tuesday.

And we blotchy Paddys are always tired and slightly disgruntled. We are looking back over the whole two weeks of Olympic disappointment with regret and sorrow and, in the media rooms, hoping the traditional Balkan feuding between the OCI and Government agencies won't break out until we are fast asleep on a long-haul flight home because basically we don't care.

People asked a lot these last few days what we thought about Usain Bolt. Doper or clean? And the answer was always the same: don't care anymore. We cared deeply 20 years ago when we sat up all night to watch the Johnson-Lewis showdown, which had the global importance of a heavyweight title fight from the 1950s. Now we believe in nobody from that race and pretty much nobody who sprinted quickly ever since. And if Usain Bolt is clean and was easily beating a field full of dopers well then he is one big, showboating genetic freak and good luck to him. But sprinting ran out of reasons for us to care about it a long time ago.

So it is in the eternal feud over who is to blame for our repeated Olympic failures. We don't care anymore. We don't have any hope that anybody will do anything about it. We'll just mind our own business and get ourselves a bit of peace and quiet thanks, lads.

We are sitting here in the press room looking forlornly at the medals table. Three medals for an Irish Olympic squad and none of them tarnished or taken back yet! Should we be celebrating? Perhaps there will be a medal minted for Alistair Cragg in the best-shooting-off-of-mouth-by-a-blow-in category. But look at the sort of countries who are close to us in population.

New Zealand, who, it is widely known, have passion for nothing but rugby and sheep, have three times as many medals. They have nine: three golds, a silver and heap of bronze ones. They have won these things in sports as varied as sailing, track cycling and triathlon.

And Norway. As narrow in their range of stereotypical pursuits as the Kiwis, the Norwegians have time only for skiing and herrings but they managed 10 medals: golds in athletics, handball and rowing, a silver in taekwando and another in shooting.

And ourselves? Depending on the boxing lads to pull something out for us with their bravery and their blood, sweat and tears and the determination of a few people like Billy Walsh and Gary Keegan to match anybody in the world. What told most about what made the boxers stand out from the general run of Irish Olympic mediocrity was the sight of Billy Walsh these last couple of days torn between tears and anger at his three medallists not getting gold.

There was none of the "just glad to be here" stuff from the boxers. There was no sending an elderly pug along because he'd been a decent skin and deserved the Olympic jolly at the end of his days. They came to Beijing to win golds and if we celebrate anything about Billy Walsh and Kenny Egan and co today it is that they have a sense of their own potential and their own input that leaves them disappointed they didn't make the top of the podium

Billy Walsh made a good point to me during the week. He was talking about boxing but he might as well have been talking about the broad mass of Irish sport. Billy said Irish boxing has its high-performance programme and nothing else.

The best of what is underneath till the age of 14 are out there in a system which has no form or shape to it. The high-performance programme gets its hands on the best 50 or so boxers in the country but by then their habits of balance, movement, stance and the rest have been formed.

Sometimes they have been lucky; they have had good, conscientious coaches. Sometimes they have been unlucky; they have had bad technique ingrained.

It's not the coaches' fault, says Billy. They are all out there begging to be educated. Coaches want to be coached in the art of coaching. They want the tips, the insider stuff, the knowledge that will make them better coaches. But there is no system for them and because they feel isolated and left out, there is a suspicion about the resources the high-performance programme gets and a slight resentment.

And Billy is right. Irish sport is all fur coat and no knickers. All talk about institutes and councils and elite programmes and not enough going in at the invisible end - finding kids when they are six, seven and eight, exposing them to the habits and values of a sporting life, providing them with the best techniques and training available at their age levels and then letting a genuine sporting culture develop.

We think cheering for the Dubs or Munster is a sporting culture. In the debate about sport we are all creationists rather than evolutionists. Here the Artists Formerly Known as BLÉ should take a bow. Apart from Paul Hession these were the Olympics that showed that for all the bellyaching and bitching they did, Irish athletics did nothing to prepare for the world post-Sonia.

For good or bad in Barcelona, in Atlanta, in Sydney and in Athens, Sonia was the Irish story of the second week of the Games. Subtract her from those Olympiads and look back at the Irish performances in track and field and measure their value against the amount of whingeing, infighting and argufying athletics has done in that time. Why did we waste our time?

Sonia was a freak of nature who just happened to be born here. The Artists Formerly Known as BLÉ could claim about as much credit for having developed her as they could for having influenced the weather.

And apart from Sonia, for all the huffing and puffing, strutting and posing athletics has done for the past five Olympiads, how much bang for our buck have we got? Should we care?

This week we'll give out the gold medal for pouting. It has to be somebody's fault so we will have a good row finding out whose fault it is and then we will start planning for 2012. Not how we will do better there but how we can make a few quid out of the Games being nearby. Gotta be some greasy-till action, hasn't there?

This war-weary column has one suggestion. Forget about 2012. Don't worry too much about 2016 either. Send small teams to each and let's look at 2020 as a possibility for the six-, seven- and eight-year-olds who are scoffing Big Macs at the moment.

Let's have no more of the fur-coat-and-no-knickers approach. Let's get kids, every kid, playing. Let's give little tax breaks to people who get out and coach kids, kick-start that vanishing spirit of volunteerism.

The true worth of a nation's sporting culture isn't really measurable in medals and cups. It's in what lies beneath. Sporting campuses without a sporting culture are nothing but a vanity.