When Abhinav Bindra won gold in the ten-metre air rifle event in the recently concluded Olympics, I was delighted. Like most Indians, I’d have taken a gold for underwater skateboarding over fifty metres for boys with gills if it had been a bona fide Olympic event.

A friend of mine pointed out that it wasn’t a surprise that India’s first gold was won by a shooter. India, he pointed out, had a long tradition of medal-winning shooters, the Maharaja of Bikaner, Karni Singh, being the most famous of them. It was also predictable in a slightly depressing way: Indians have been athletically challenged for so long that it seemed appropriate that first gold was struck in an event where competitors were required to stand stock still.

The television coverage of the event was exciting provided you weren’t the sort of crude spectator who wanted visceral excitement. It was a lot like watching Anand play Kasparov for the world championship of chess all those years ago: nothing happened most of the time. In the chess match, the two hunched figures would occasionally, but visibly, make a move as in pushing a pawn forward or make a knight do things. Abhinav’s event was altogether more subtle, more Zen-like. The shooters took it in turn to shoot, but it was hard to tell their moments of activity apart from their passages of rest. This was because the shooters didn’t lower their rifles (which were elaborate devices that looked too sophisticated for something as basic as shooting a bullet) in between shots. They rested them on high stands and cuddled them as if they were alive. One of Bindra’s rivals was caught by the camera nuzzling his gun; I turned my eyes away, embarrassed at being privy to such intimacy.

Bindra, who seems a charming and unaffected man in his civvies, came across as a killer nerd in full kit. The thing he wore around his head to help him sight the target, an articulated frame with blinkers and lenses, made him look like a lethal optometrist. The two Doordarshan commentators who, like the rest of us, had no idea why Bindra was gaining points at the expense of his rivals, tried bravely to adopt the breathless hysteria that had worked so well with hockey matches in Olympics past, to the needs of this strange, non-doing sport… and failed. The target was so small that even close-ups failed to convey the difference between good shots and bad ones, and the enigmatic Abhinav seemed to win gold on account of superior inertia.

Watching him, I suddenly thought of how much more exciting dart championships on British television used to be: large men with beer bellies flipping darts with improbable delicacy, their pinkies extended, and then the riveting close ups of the dartboard as the missiles thunked home. Why wasn’t darts an Olympic sport? There was a simplicity to it, a manual quality, compared to the the automated gizmo-like feel of air-rifle shooting, that corresponded more closely to the Olympic ideal of physical striving and excellence.

For that matter, why wasn’t snooker or pool an Olympic medal sport? Snooker, with its green baize and coloured balls, makes for great television, and in terms of physical exertion, snooker is to air rifle shooting what the decathlon is to snooker. I can only guess that both snooker and darts are associated with pubs and bars and drink, and don’t come across as wholesome sports.

The medals we won for boxing caused me a different kind of unease. On the one hand, boxing is everything air-rifle shooting is not: an adrenalin-driven, violent, totally physical sport where you have no apparatus apart from your gloved hands and your protected head. The action is rapid, and the boxers aim their blows in a state of perpetual motion, and not from within a still trance. As a boy, I had tracked Muhammad Ali’s victories and defeats, desperately willing him on to win, but as I grew older and Ali’s boxing-induced Parkinson’s became more evident and more disabling, I stopped following the sport, if sport it is.

Suddenly, unbidden, after decades of peaceful spectatorship, my brother and I found ourselves shouting brutal, profane encouragement to Akhil Kumar as he fought the world champion, Sergey Vodapyanov, to a standstill and eventually won. For a few breathless seconds after the ref raised our boy’s arm, we experienced the most perfect satisfaction that is ever given to a spectator to feel. Then the Russian world champion scrunched up his face and cried, circling the ring in an unbelieving daze, and my brother and I saw that he was just a young, heartbroken boy and felt ashamed of our miserable, vicarious, troll-like glee.

Michael Phelps’s astonishing haul of eight gold medals left me unmoved. No fault of his; it’s just that modern swimming with its body suits and shower caps and goggles makes swimmers completely anonymous. It was like tracking a row of shiny torpedoes or a pod of cloned mermen. Also, I heard that his training regime included a diet that had him consume 12,000 calories a day. Once you’re told that someone eats as much as six grown men, it’s hard to think of him as human.

The most wonderful moment of the entire Olympics was the Insane Bolt’s 100-metre dash. Usain Bolt? What kind of a name was that? Was he a Jamaican Muslim trying to be discreet in Bush’s world by dropping an aitch? Whoever he was, he was a force of nature. If events as quick as the two short sprints can be said to tell a story, it was a Boy’s Own Paper story: in both the 100 and 200 metre finals, Usain got off to theatrically slow starts, hauled in the rest of the field, then left them for dead. In the shorter of the two sprints, he ran a world record and still managed to stroll down to the finish line in a lower gear, disdaining the vulgar urgency of lesser men who lunge at the tape.

Then I read somewhere that if Usain hadn’t become a champion sprinter, he would have become a fast bowler and felt a pang that alloyed my delight in his triumphs. The dreadful decline of the West Indies cricket team has been the most depressing aspect of cricket’s recent history, and I couldn’t help thinking of Bolt sprinting down to the stumps, as formidable as the great Courtney Walsh, only faster, putting the fear God into wicked Australian batsmen. Still, the article said that Tendulkar was a hero of his, and that, in an obscure way, was a consolation.