Day 4,967ish. Beginning to feel a bit like that English walker looked yesterday when he finished last in the men's 50km race, hobbling over the line a full hour and a bit behind the winner and looking less healthy than your average corpse. Like Chris Maddocks, we're not waddling any more. And we can't see the carpet for empty Pot Noodles cartons.
If the microwavable curried cheese and rabbit flavour was on the IOC's banned substance list we'd be in the CJ Hunters by now, we've been living on it since the opening ceremony kicked off nine and half months ago, or thereabouts.
We'd have to hire Johnnie Cochran to prove that a dodgy LA cop planted the empty cartons on our livingroom floor, Barry Scheck to establish that the stains on our remote control weren't in fact curried cheese and rabbit, rather spicy pigeon and liver, and F Lee Bailey to show that we weren't even in the livingroom in the first place, that we'd never even met the Lympics, never mind spent every waking and sleeping hour in its company.
We expect the world to have changed quite a bit by the time we emerge blinking in to the natural light on Monday. We hope Douglas Hyde is still President, though, 'cos we always liked him, and that the Bay City Rollers are still top of the Hit Parade. Bye bye baby, baby goodbye, da, na, na. But quite how we'll cope with life without televised kayaking we're not sure.
"Yes, I suppose it is sad that we only see canoe kayaking on television once every four years, but I suppose it's just a fact of life - until minority sports get some big sponsorship then commercial stations aren't particularly interested," said the Eurosport man yesterday in response to an email from an upset kayak junkie.
Indeed. If it wasn't for the big sponsorship they receive from monster multinational companies like Coca Cola, Microsoft and Sony we wouldn't see the likes of the Latvian synchronised egg and spoon national championships, not to mention tractor pulling and indoor windsurfing, on Eurosport during the year.
While there is no shortage of synchronised egg and spoon expert analysts available to the channel they've struggled a little so far to find people who know more than you and me about Olympic sports such as kayaking and mistral fleet racing. At least the man (whose name we never caught) in charge of the kayaking yesterday was honest enough to admit that he wouldn't know a K2 from a fish finger. "Our regular kayaking commentator David Goldstrom was, unfortunately, called away for family reasons, so here I am," he said apologetically before the men's K2 Sprint 500m heats.
His co-commentator, an Australian who's name we didn't catch either, was hugely supportive. "You're doing a fantastic job, especially pronouncing the names," he gushed. The pair then previewed the heats by speaking at length about the weather, how nice the Czech kayakers were, how expensive it is to fly from the Czech Republic to Australia, how exciting the previous night's long jump competition had been, how amazing the retracting roof over their commentary position was and the dangers of exposing your skin to the sun. Then the races started and they said "oooh" and "err" and "um" and "mmm" a lot, which translated, roughly, as "why am I here?".
Later, Eurosport's Syd Hoare tried to whip us into a frenzy over taekwando, But to no avail. Yes, we're entirely ignorant of this sport's finer details, but this is roughly how we see it: two heavily-padded people stand glaring at each other wearing expressions that say "Are ya startin'?", "D'you wanna slap?". Then they kick each other in the head and it's all over.
Sailing? Now that's more refined, a sport for people who can afford to buy houses in Dublin. Britain's Ben Ainslie won gold yesterday but not before Brazil's "Robert Scheidt made a right mess of it", as our Eurosport commentator told us. We chuckled too, before settling down to another microwavable curried cheese and rabbit feast.
