An Age To Get A Bronze

While the Great Britain and NI squad set themselves the paltry target of three medals for the 11th IAAF World Championships, spare a thought for the host nation. Bigged up massively by a partisan media, by the eighth and penultimate day of the competition, they had won not a sausage.

Hammer-throwing pin-up boy and medal favourite Koji Murofushi can deliver FedEx parcels to China in double-quick time (according to his oft-played commercial at any rate), but he just couldn't bring home the bacon, finishing a lowly sixth.

There was the hugely likable long-distance runner Kayoko Fukushi (pictured below) who contested the 3,000m steeplechase and 5,000m and got pasted in both, but whose post-race jollity in the face of defeat was the very epitome of the Olympian ideal.

Come Saturday, the pressure was on the 100m relay team. Could veteran Nobuharu Asahara, now 35, shepherd a bunch of rookies, one looking like a Japanese George Michael, another a spindly youth with hair worse than Paul Weller's, to the nation's first medal? Evidently the CG department didn't think so. They'd taken the evening off and left it to the local manga guy to graphically depict the fact that the Japanese quartet had posted the third fastest qualifying time. Maybe the presenter on the left did it - he looks pretty proud of himself.

Game though Asahara-san was, his relay squad finished fifth. But they got heroes' receptions anyway.

So, to Sunday morning and the last event in which Japan could possibly win anything (because they were not contesting any of the other finals), the womens marathon. And they turned up mob-handed, with five athletes. The marathon is an excruciating event, not made any easier by 30-degree heat and Japan's punishing humidity. One by one the Japanese competitors reluctantly dropped off the leading peloton, leaving Reika Tosa grimly hanging on, with the weight of a nation on her shoulders and a camera shoved up her nose, for the last 5km.

Although she dropped back to fourth a few kilometres out, just before they hit the stadium she clawed her way past the Chinese athlete to occupy the precious medal position. The crowd went wild, the presenters went bonkers and the cameraman on the motorbike bike wasn't allowed in the stadium. Ms Tosa got her adulation and her dignity restored too. Ganbatte all round!