Let’s get this clear right from the start: the Brits do not have a target at these Games. The BOA has made it very clear that the aim is to finish fourth at the London Games of 2012, but here, we are just taking it as it comes.

All that talk about the target of finishing in eighth place is a load of nonsense.

The only aim set out by Team GB - a rather unhappy bit of branding, don’t you think? - is to finish better than they did in Athens. That’s simple enough, isn’t it? And at the Athens Games of 2004, Great Britain finished tenth. That seems to me to mean that the Brits have a target of finishing ninth. So the team have a target that is not a target.

Later on, we had a further, er, clarification. The target was officially eighth place and always had been. That, and 35 medals. All that talk of 41 medals was “a stretch figure”. What the bloody hell’s that? I was beginning to feel a touch confused. I suppose that was inevitable at a bright’n’breezy pre-Games press conference from the Team GB high-ups; everything here is inspirational, everybody is focused and let’s bring it on. Couldn’t agree more. But let’s take nothing for granted, for here is the killer stat, rattled off with disconcerting fluency by Simon Clegg, chef de mission.

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Are you ready for it? It is 0.545sec. That was the total time between first and second in five different events in which Britain won gold in Athens: Kelly Holmes, twice, Chris Hoy, the cyclist, the men’s four in rowing and the men’s 4 x 100 metres track team. That scant half-second was the difference between five golds and what would have been five silvers, and that was the difference between tenth place and what would have been seventeenth.

In other words, a feather either way swings the balance, and if that is true in life, it is doubly and quadruply true in sport. In Doctor Who, the future of the world depended on whether or not Catherine Tate turned left or right at a T-junction; well, the future of Britain depends on, well, all the things you can possibly do in a couple of hundredths of a second.

Which explains why, behind all the brightness and all the breeze, the atmosphere was pretty fraught. The muddle about targets was significant. What can you do but think of all the things that can go wrong? That is as true for the people who manage the Olympic funding as it is for the athletes out there dealing in the hundredths and the thousandths.

Team GB have a very straightforward job: to turn public money into gold. But straightforward is not the same as simple. A good show here is important for many reasons beyond the simple and straightforward joy of it. London stages the Games in 2012, as you may have heard; credibility as a strong and committed Olympic nation must be maintained for a hundred different reasons. And you maintain such things not by money or speeches or even by fast times and great performances. You do so with medals.

David Brailsford is perhaps the most effective person in British sport. Certainly he is the best at the money-into-medals stuff. He is performance director of the cycling team and he was openly scoffing at targets. Hell, no, they don’t have a medal target. They have a series of performance targets, based on time. If the times are achieved, the medals will come. Target times are under your control, so that’s how you train.

“Doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “Whether the British target is 35 medals or 41, it won’t affect the way we train. We just have to look forward. We have to look to improve. It’s unacceptable not to look forward.”

Cycling is likely to be the biggest medal-getter for Britain at these Games and it’s this kind of dedicated, elite performance-driven stuff that has led some to speculate that fourth place in the medal table could be achieved four years early.

In Atlanta in 1996, Britain won a single gold medal, with the twin knights, Redgrave and Pinsent. After that the lottery money began to come in, and in Sydney, there were 11 golds, nine more in Athens. There must be no falling away, there must be progress for the next hosts. Each individual athlete is aware of this stress, but when viewed collectively, the business gets still more fraught for the people in charge. And the more fraught you get, the brighter and breezier you become.

Klüft shows path to gold can be based on joy not suffering

There is a chance of a British gold in the heptathlon with Kelly Sotherton. Not just because of the hundredths, but because of Carolina Klüft. And if parochialism is a right and proper stance for a national Olympic committee, we observers can be let off. I am a devotee of Klüft, who is an enthralling, brilliant and stunningly impressive human being. She is ever so slightly Swedish, but I have cheered for her as she won the heptathlon in overwhelming style in Athens, and I would have cheered for her here.

But alas, she has decided not to compete in the heptathlon this year, because she doesn’t feel like it; not in the manner of a diva throwing a pout, but like a human being who doesn’t give a stuff. And this gives Sotherton a chance for a gold that simply wouldn’t exist if Klüft were about. So it’s not just performance that matters where medals are concerned, medals can be decided by all kinds of uncontrollable things, things such as the mood of an incandescently splendid athlete.

I really wish Klüft was doing the heptathlon. How could she just walk away? The answer is that her strength was always that she might walk away. The fact that competition wasn’t everything to her gave her added strength, put wings on her heels. She was free of many of the competitor’s traditional neuroses because she genuinely believed that it didn’t matter, that it was a bit of fun, that there were more important things in life.

She is here competing in the long jump – as well as the triple jump – because she still loves that. She won’t win it, she is aware of that. And if she didn’t have the ability to walk away from a gold medal, she would never have won one.

Taxi driver joins rank of heroes

How badly do the Beijingers – the ordinary people of Beijing – want these Games to be a success? The other day I left my notebook in a taxi, being a bit of a bloody fool. But a friend explained that if I had the receipt – what do you mean, if? – I could trace the taxi and perhaps get it back.

So I went back to the media village and said to the several smilers and helpers who greeted me: “I left my notebook in a taxi. Could you please . . .”

“We already got it.” And they had. Team GB go on about the way the Chinese organisers have “raised the bar” for London. A single Chinese taxi driver raised it to stratospheric heights: can you imagine a London cabbie driving all the way back to his starting point to hand in a notebook owned by a Chinese journalist?

I had that Simon Barnes’s notebook in the back of the cab once.