A remarkable change has since occurred. Britain beat India to reach Beijing, finishing fifth at the Games, and the England team (which forms the vast majority of the GB squad) went on to stun their rivals by lifting the 2009 EuroHockey Nations title. They came from behind to beat Germany, the current world and Olympic champions, in the final.

Now, England are through to the last four of the World Cup for the first time since 1986, and are once again pitted against the Germans. After years - if not decades - in hockey's doldrums, even a World Cup semi-final caps a commendable reversal of fortunes.

Lifting the World Cup title is a tantalising prospect this week, but just two years ago it appeared unthinkable.

All smiles for England - it wasn't like that two years ago. Photo: AP

"I remember you," sighs the England (and GB) team's performance director, David Faulkner, when I mention interviewing him at a freezing cold Reading Hockey Club before that all-important Olympic qualifying tournament.

Pressed on reasons for British hockey's perilous state at the time, Faulkner had told me to be patient - the sport needed two four-year Olympic cycles to be "fixed", and Beijing represented the halfway mark, he said. Now, with that in mind, does Faulkner feel vindicated?

"I wouldn't use that word, but we have moved on after Beijing," he says. "The Olympic qualifier in Chile was an experience in itself and, combined with Beijing and the Europeans, that has made this group of players stronger and stronger.

"But we're still in a developing phase. I don't want people to get too carried away. By all means get excited, I like that, but the job is not done yet. Will it ever be finished? I doubt it."

It hasn't all been plain sailing since Beijing. England finished last in December's Champions Trophy - admittedly a tournament involving the world's top six teams, of which England are ranked sixth, but coming last never looks good.

"Winning the European title was brilliant, then at the Champions Trophy we changed the team around a bit and took a couple of younger guys," explains England captain Barry Middleton - who, at the age of 26, already has well over 100 caps for England, and many more for Great Britain.

"We finished last but we didn't look to peak there, we looked to peak at the World Cup instead.

"One of the problems with world hockey at the minute is it's very busy. It's pretty hard to peak for two tournaments in three or four months, especially during our winter. We always said the Champions Trophy wasn't a true reflection of how good we can be."

Middleton made his international debut in 2003 and has been part of UK hockey's rollercoaster ride ever since. He insists his team always knew they could reach the last four of the World Cup - "nobody really believed us, but we felt we could do it" - and argues, like Faulkner, that the team's upswing can be traced back several years.

"After 2004, things changed a lot. Most of the guys playing now got their first caps then and, over the last couple of years, a lot of the youngsters coming through have been very talented. We have more technical ability than we've ever had before in the squad.

"In the last two years we've been given the freedom to play a different hockey than England teams have played in a long time. Now we play fast, attacking hockey; we want to entertain and put pressure on other teams.

"For the three or four years before that, we looked to contain teams, stay in a game, defend well, and maybe that would get us through. Now we look to attack."

Nor will that change against Germany, according to Middleton, despite their opponents' impressive array of trophies: "Our game plan has been the same for the last two years. We know it inside out, it won't change. As long as we play as well as we can to our game, then we can beat them, so we won't do anything special."

But while Middleton's focus rightly extends no further than the next game, Faulkner needs to contemplate the two fronts on which he must now sustain hockey's momentum.

The first is the playing staff. The crop of players first brought together in 2004 is reaching a pinnacle at this World Cup, but the team is older than some, and will need replenishing with new talent sooner or later.

England's Under-21 team suffered a disastrous Junior World Cup in Malaysia last year, earning some damning press back in Britain, in which Faulkner was quoted as bemoaning a "void" where young, British talent should be. He says he is still in the process of plugging that gap.

"The oldest player in the German team here is, I think, 26," he tells me. "Their average age is 22. They can do that because they have a system, and our target is to have the same system, but it'll take another two or three years to develop."

Since another two or three years will take us past London 2012, it is correct to assume the England team you watch face Germany on Thursday will closely resemble the British team that will play at a home Olympics in two years' time.

"In men's hockey, if you're not in the current GB group, you'll find it very difficult to break into that," adds Faulkner. "The current lads are making it even more difficult with the performances they're putting in.

"But everybody knows the most successful nations in the world are looking at the next Olympic cycle while in the current cycle, and I've started doing a lot of work on hockey post-2012 already."

That work extends off the pitch, too, because hockey rarely gets an opportunity like this to generate buzz around the sport. Hockey players and supporters mutter darkly about a lack of coverage in Britain, and this competition represents the sport's best chance in years to rectify that.

Faulkner reached the World Cup final in 1986 as a player, then won gold at the Seoul Olympics with Britain two years later, playing alongside the likes of Sean Kerly and Imran Sherwani - names etched into the memories of a generation of British sports fans.

He knows what happens when hockey catches the public eye, and wants the sport to seize the moment this time.

"The big difference between the success in 1986 or 1988 and the success now is that we are prepared for it. What I'm hearing from back home, and reading from articles sent to me, is that there is a lot of consistency with what we saw 20 years ago in terms of coverage back in the UK.

"I understand Ashley Jackson's goal against India was on the BBC 10 O'Clock News - hockey doesn't do that, and hasn't done for two decades. We want to capitalise on that profile.

"What we have to be clear about is how we make our players household names. Before we came out to India we held a press day, which we've never done before. The sport needs to be geared up - maybe a campaign of 'Are you ready for 2012 hockey?', because we will have a profile we've never had before."

Savvy marketing alone, however, won't cut it. Everyone inside the team knows sustained international results are hockey's only hope of grabbing headlines with any regularity.

"We know it's going to be hard," Middleton admits. "The Spanish have missed out this time and they're ranked third in the world. There will be more and more teams who miss out.

"This squad is only going to be together for two, three, maybe four years from now, and it's going to be hard to consistently do it. The Germans have done it for 15 years, the Australians have done it for 20.

"It's hard to get the system right to produce people who can do this all the time but, once you can do it, it's easier. Hopefully we can at least do it for the next three or four years."

England v Germany in the men's Hockey World Cup semi-finals will be live on the red button from 1235 GMT on Thursday, 11 March. Join me on the BBC Sport website at the same time for our live text commentary of the game.

Today, the Labour MP has given an interview to London's Evening Standard which is likely to anger 2012 officials even more.

The big Olympic issue at the moment is legacy; what is going to be left for both Londoners and the rest of the UK when the Olympic party is over.

Hoey has attacked the Government for forgetting the promises made about changing the sporting face of Britain when 2012 made their pitch to the International Olympic Committee in Singapore in 2005. Remember the emotional film about inspiring children worldwide to take up sport.

She even claims that London chairman Lord Coe regrets using the word 'legacy'.

Hoey is quoted by former BBC and Daily Telegraph sports reporter Mihir Bose as saying: "Two years ago I spoke to Seb about legacy. He said, Kate, I wish I had never used word (sic) legacy'."

I'd be surprised if Coe doesn't deny this conversation. The double Olympic champion is always talking about how he wants the Games to change the lives of kids and to provide unprecedented sports facilities for London, which is way behind most cities in the UK.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall when London Mayor Boris Johnson next sits down with Seb Coe on the 2012 board. Hoey is Johnson's sports commissioner who is responsible for helping to deliver 2012 grass roots legacy.

Does she have a point, though?

I always believed Hoey's argument on Paris during the bid was weak. Olympic bidding isn't about who deserves the Games otherwise Paris would have won on determination alone, having bid twice before. The French do have better sports facilities but the Games would not have had the same impact on the French capital as they are already having on London.

But some would say she has a point on legacy. Is it really as joined up as the Government keeps telling us? Are we using the Games enough to inspire kids up and down the country to take up sport? And what about the Olympic Park? Is it really going to be a great legacy for London? We still don't know what will happen to the main stadium.

There are still many questions to be answered.

There's also a risk of being caricatured as cheerleaders because we have such a stake in Olympic broadcasting, and we're conscious that our project team operates largely among people who are utterly consumed by the Olympic year in prospect - which isn't the case for most of our audiences.

So the trick is to make sure the independent journalism is being done now, and the longer-term programmes are being commissioned, ready for the point when "Olympic world" and "real world" coincide.

The Olympic Stadium nears completion

One of the pleasures in this job is seeing how ideas in this area are already becoming reality.

An example: in the autumn of 2008 I went to a meeting of our Global News teams - the people who run World Service radio, BBC World and our internationally-facing websites - to chat about how the main BBC 2012 project could work with them.

This has a fantastic opportunity in that we're enormously proud of our global broadcasting role and it would be nuts for it not to be a main plank of the BBC Olympic story, but also the pain that the rights restrictions mean it can share very little of the action when the Games themselves get under way.

So what's essential is that they show imagination and ambition in what the wider story means for the UK and for the world.

At that meeting, Tony Phillips mentioned a thought that the Olympic boroughs already have 'the world' living there: local residents in Hackney come from Jamaica and Senegal, from India and Algeria.

This is part of the theme I've touched on before about the incredible diversity of London in general and the East of the city in particular.

So wouldn't it be interesting to follow their story between now and 2012 - to see how an Olympics based on the concept of "the world in one city" tries to deliver what it promised?

Well, that partly-formed thought of 18 months ago is now a series on the BBC World Service. Its website is here and you can listen to the most recent episode here.

You'll see that this is interactive too: you can email some of the people featured in the programme, and the excellent "World Have Your Say" has already been to Hackney to connect global audiences to the place where their greatest athletes will compete in two years' time. It's available as a podcast here.

Meanwhile on television last week, audiences in London could see "The Day The Olympics Come to Town" - unfortunately not available on iPlayer because of rights restrictions - which was an imagining of the way London might operate in 2012. It's the latest sign of the way that BBC London will follow the Olympic story for audiences in the capital.

I should say that these kind of programmes aren't controlled by the 2012 project team.

It's right that the BBC journalists operate independently, and I've often said - both now and previously as director of sport - that my personal role is to let programmes like Newsnight be Newsnight and not to seek to limit our programme-makers' ability to operate freely.

London is well known for its diversity

Indeed, what we're doing as a project team in addition to our core planning function is encouraging creativity around the BBC: helping make connections, liaising with the outside bodies and making sure that there's an attractive range of programmes for all our audiences as Olympic fever grows.

There's another reason too, of course, why there are "Chinese walls" at this stage between the 2012 project and some of our programme-making.

We spend a lot of time with Locog, www.london2012.com and our other key partners, and it wouldn't be right for us to hotfoot it from an external planning meeting to feeding the juiciest morsels to our output teams.

There's nothing new about this in that confidentiality and daily news co-exist on a whole range of issues - and it's the same with some long-form documentaries where exclusive filming access can give you scoops which have to be saved until the scheduled transmission time.

The crucial thing that guides us is public interest: the public interest in London 2012 being planned safely and successfully for the UK and the world, and equally non-negotiable the public interest in asking the awkward questions and holding the decision-makers to account.

It can be a difficult tight-rope to walk, but I can't see any other way of doing it - and if the story is to be told properly it has to be "warts and all".

It's just me and my crew-mates sitting on the start line, holding our oars, watching for the moment the red light goes out and green comes on.

When we win it's just us standing on the medal rostrum; when we lose it's just us floating in our boats in the finish area, heads in hands.

But of course there's more to it than that. We often talk about the iceberg - we are the tip of the iceberg, the ones who are rowing the strokes and fighting the pain; but for every one athlete, there are literally hundreds of people below.

They're never seen on television but - to misquote John Donne - no athlete is an island: your family, friends and relationships form a rock-solid support network for you to rack up your achievements on top.

What does that really mean, though? What role do these invisible people actually play in the life of an athlete?

At the Beijing Olympics, the whole regatta was very strictly accredited for security reasons so the only area to mix with supporters was in a tent called the "Kiss and Cry Zone". No joke, that's what it was called in the five or so languages that every piece of writing in the Olympics is translated into.

And I found that quite poignant. Everything that my parents, family and friends had done for me through the years in support of my rowing, all the talking and tea-drinking and celebrating or consoling, came down to that tent. They would be there just to have a kiss and cry when it was all over.

The majority of my family live down in Cornwall so I rarely get to see them as for 99% of the time I'm chained to the River Thames. Consequently, I rely very heavily on my friendship group in London.

Most of my mates I've known since we were all at Downing College, Cambridge, and most of them I met through the college boat club when we were all racing college bumps on the Cam. I'm fortunate enough that they all love to come out to various European or Chinese lakes to watch me race - although I'm under no illusions that this is anything more than an excuse for a boozy weekend away.

Annabel (bottom, second from right) and partner Anna Bebington had strong support at the 2009 World Championships in Poland

Being a full-time international athlete is a rather peculiar life. I'm abroad a huge amount of time and spend most of my life in a state of extreme fatigue and pressure.

Therefore, I can't always be a very good friend. People talk about commitment, single-minded focus and determination; but what this translates into a lot of the time is that I just have to be rather selfish. I have to miss birthday parties and weddings; I can't go on communal holidays; I'm rarely available for a spontaneous night out or weekend away.

Hopefully, my friends will remember that I'm only an athlete for eight to 10 years, they won't ask too much of me and will wait for me to be normal again. They won't expect more of me than I can give, and won't demand anything that compromises my unique lifestyle and strange obsession with moving a boat backwards through the water.

Yet having a large group of friends and family who are integral to your pathway to Olympic success also brings its own kind of pressure. It's a fairly frequent lament, that an athlete who fails to achieve a certain result will feel like he or she has "let everyone down".

And I think the increasing levels of expectation that will come from having a home Olympics will add to this. I certainly felt a higher amount of pressure from having so many of my family and friends on the bank in 2006, when the rowing World Championships were in the UK.

My support networks are there for me every day of the year to help me along the road; but when I push out into the lake for the Olympic regatta in July 2012, I'll be on my own and will live and die by what I do on that day.

The beginning of the closing ceremony saw the fourth strut of the indoor cauldron - which failed to activate as the Games opened, more than two weeks ago - finally lifted into place, in front of the world, with a sense of humour and self-deprecating style.

Closing ceremonies can, by their nature, become sad affairs. They look back at what has gone before, at events so fresh in the mind that it seems too soon for retrospectives. They look ahead to a future so distant, it feels barely relevant.

But what happens next is important for Canada, and for Great Britain - on and off the field of play.

Canada began its closing ceremony by acknowledging a mistake from the opening ceremony

For most of Britain's winter sports athletes, the question is what their target now becomes.

Arguments surrounding funding body UK Sport's three-medal target, and more broadly how that funding is allocated, will rage on elsewhere. But the stated pledge of UK Sport is to invest purely in "athletes and sports who we believe have a genuine opportunity of winning medals".

Only one Briton took that opportunity in Vancouver: Amy Williams. The 27-year-old, who eclipsed skeleton team-mate Shelley Rudman's silver in Turin four years ago, is one of the liveliest and most striking members of the British team. Rudman carried the British flag at the opening ceremony; Williams had the honour at the close.

In October last year, I met her at the British skeleton team's training facility in Bath. To describe it as such makes it sound as though a full track exists, but you will find no breakneck chutes of ice - just a small hill with a metal tray on rails, attached to a bungee cord. I wrote in more detail about it at the time.

Williams bubbled with enthusiasm as we spoke. She is a character: loud, extroverted, immensely approachable and prepared to say what she thinks. She kept her profile low in the run-up to the Games, and maybe that helped her take gold. While Canada's Mellisa Hollingsworth broke under extraordinary pressure as the home favourite, and Rudman struggled to master the track, Williams kept her composure.

Her challenge is to retain that composure as an Olympic gold medallist - no easy task, as BBC Sport's own previous Olympic winners have explained. When we spoke to her at the side of the Whistler track, moments after her victory, she struggled to grasp how fans at the sidelines knew her name: "I've no idea who they are," she said, staring at her name painted on their stomachs. "They know me, though." Get used to it.

But the British team has wider challenge in identifying reasons for the gap between UK Sport's expectations and the reality, and finding solutions once those reasons come to light.

The Winter Olympic team has four years to close that gap. London's Summer Olympic organisers, however, already face the intense, worldwide scrutiny which accompanies the Games.

They have lessons to draw from Vancouver. Things have gone wrong here - nobody should die competing in any sport and, while the weather cannot be tamed, it can be accommodated. But the Games recovered in a spirited, determined and optimistic fashion, and most of the operation visible to me has been difficult to fault.

The comedic light touch with which Vancouver put the failure of the Olympic cauldron to bed is instructive. Obstacles can be overcome, defeats can be followed by victories. London faces a big challenge to generate the same enthusiasm for the Games as witnessed here from Canadians, but, to reverse one of the British team's slogans, nothing is impossible.

And speaking of Vancouver, what happens next in Canada is a question that fascinates the host nation's media, many of whom were astonished by the outpouring of national pride that accompanied the Games.

Stephen Brunt, sportswriter for the country's Globe and Mail newspaper, summed it up as follows:

"Come Monday morning, come the weeks and months and years after that, who knows if there will even be a hint left behind of what has happened here beyond a short hangover? Whether all of those jerseys and flags and maple leaf hats will gather dust in some closet, like artifacts of a graduation, of a wedding, other signpost moments that are over, and gone."

As a visitor, it is hard to imagine Vancouver without the flags, cowbells and maple leaf regalia. But many Canadians insist they are not in keeping with the country's mindset. Some even worry it makes them "look American", or at least like the Canadian stereotype of their southern neighbours.

It feels as though most people here would love to keep this feeling going - prolong the sensation, hold on to each other having discovered that, actually, everybody feels that way.

Whether it can be sustained in the absence of an Olympic catalyst remains to be seen, though it certainly manifested itself at the closing ceremony. The entire arena rose in applause on several occasions, most notably when commemorating Nodar Kumaritashvili's death, and on chief organiser John Furlong's mention of earlier events in Canada Hockey Place.

With that in so many minds, the closing ceremony felt more like a back-up for the hockey final than anything else. Vancouver's real defining moment, the true crowning of the Games, came with Sidney Crosby's overtime winner to earn his country the men's ice hockey gold medal, putting arch-rivals the United States to the sword.

Maybe if Canada had lost the hockey, the closing ceremony would have helped the nation salvage its day. But every Canadian sat inside BC Place for the ceremony knew the actual party, ongoing for those outside in downtown Vancouver, would begin for them the moment the performances finished. Crosby supplied the Olympic moment, Canadians supplied the Olympic spirit. And that is all you need.

The problem, as with most things in life, is a lack of cash.

Having no decent mountains clearly doesn't help, though Amy Williams's gold medal in the skeleton proves you don't need a domestic track to triumph.

But what you do need is sufficient coffers to finance a world-class structure which can then pay for training, travel, coaching and support. And British skiing has neither.

Britain's top skier Chemmy Alcott did not do as well as she had hoped in Vancouver

The much-publicised collapse of skiing's governing body before the Games left the likes of British number one Chemmy Alcott to fund herself, with coaches working without pay.

The British Olympic Association stepped in for the Games, and wrangling will soon begin over a new body. But it will still only be able to dish out the lottery funds it gets from UK Sport.

And in the four years up to Vancouver, skiing received a grand total of £372,000. That's less than beach volleyball will get for London 2012 (£395,000) and compares to £2.11m for skeleton.

Against this background, Alcott, who also relies on private sponsors, matched her best Olympic result with 11th in the combined event at Whistler. She added a 13th in the downhill, alongside 20th in super-G and 27th in giant slalom. The best result from the British men was a 27th by Dave Ryding in slalom.

The 27-year-old Alcott, who was skiing in her third Games, is blessed by good looks and has been the face of British skiing in recent years. But this has been held against her by some, who claim that she is more style than substance.

In terms of absolute results, she may not have improved on Turin, but since then she has lost her mother, suffered a debilitating foot injury and broken her ankle, not to mention the financial struggles which are causing her to doubt her future in the sport.

The men's team of Ryding, 23, Ed Drake, 24 and Andrew Noble, 25, were all making their Olympic debuts in Vancouver to gain experience for Sochi in 2014.

The BOA has been keen to point out in Canada that most medal wins come at an athlete's second Games. (It's taken American speed queen Lindsey Vonn three Olympics now to earn her first medals, while Swiss veteran Didier Cuche has only won one despite an otherwise glittering career.)

The question is, will the money men deem Britain's skiers - based on results and future potential - worth ploughing more cash into?

"Overall, performances were good and we can be satisfied, but we know we are capable of a lot more," said British ski team chief Mark Tilston.

"We can ski better, but it's a constant battle. We're competing on such a skeleton programme and the support and resources are so far behind all the other nations.

"Until we're in a different climate we can't really expect to compete much better than we are now."

Britain's five-time Olympic ski racer Graham Bell added: "Chemmy can certainly take a lot of credit from her downhill performance. That was impressive, although she could have done a bit better after that.

"There are no fundamental flaws in her technique, otherwise she wouldn't have been scoring top 10s in World Cup. It's the small things that count and they all add up.

"I always wonder what would have happened if she had been on, say, the US team - whether it would have been a different story.

"But it's a chicken-and-egg scenario. If you don't fund people, they won't perform."

Britain's lack of mountains means it's never going to have a deep talent pool compared with alpine countries where, in some areas, skiing is on the school curriculum. According to Bell, it takes "15-20" years to develop a ski racer to Olympic standard. That's a lot of funding for no immediate reward. And the level of international competition is phenomenal.

"Just in Austria there are thousands of kids between 11 and 14 racing at a very high level," said Bell.

"But that doesn't mean with the one or two skiers we have coming through we shouldn't be able to support them well enough to compete.

"Even teams like France and Italy, who haven't performed so well here, have 10 times as much funding per head than Britain."

And Bell is concerned that skiing will get overlooked in the clamour for cash by sports which offer a "quicker fix".

"If you can bung a bit of money into sliding sports and you can get someone across from another sport and within six months they're world champions, UK Sport thinks this is a 'no-brainer'," he added.

"It's absolutely no surprise to me that the sport where we won a medal is the one we get the most money in. It's the same thing with Canada's 'Own the Podium'."

The evidence from sports such as cycling, rowing and sailing does seem to suggest that the more money you pump in, the better the results.

But the chief executive of UK Sport, John Steele, insists there is more to it than simply throwing around cash, and insists his body wil continue to make hard-nosed funding decisions.

"It's too easy to say 'if we had more money we could do better'," he said. "If it was that easy we'd just write cheques and stand back.

"We have always been true to our 'no compromise' principle in investing only in athletes and sports who we believe have a genuine opportunity of winning medals.

"The fantastic performances by the members of the British Bob Skeleton team shows this strategy does work and medals can be won if the right programmes and athletes are in place to benefit from our support and investment."

Britain's best Olympic skiing result remains Georgina Hathorn's fourth place in the slalom in Grenoble in 1968. For the men, the benchmark is still Martin Bell's (Graham Bell's brother) eighth in the downhill at Calgary in 1988, barring Alain Baxter's slalom third in Salt Lake City before he was stripped of a bronze medal for failing a drugs test. (He was later cleared of any wrongdoing but was not allowed his medal back).

At this point you might be thinking, "So what? All this is irrelevant. Skiing is just an elitist sport."

Well, 1.27m people went on a winter sports holiday in 2008/2009, according to data from the Ski Club of Great Britain, and there will be plenty of other fans of the sport who didn't make it that year. That's compared to the handful of sliders in the UK. And beach volleyball players, for that matter. As for accusations of being a "posh" sport, you only have to go to any ski resort across the Alps and you'll find Britons from all walks of life.

"There are nearly two million skiers in the UK and they need to be represented by a top level ski and snowboard team," said Bell.

One way to tap into this market in the search for Olympic success could be to target the exciting new Games discipline of ski cross, which saw peak viewing figures of four million on BBC TV last week. It's been suggested that this could appeal more to British youngsters who do not have a national affinity with ski racing and for whom the traditional alpine disciplines may look staid.

But Bell is not convinced and reckons the ski cross in Sochi will be "way more competitive" than it is now.

"Effectively, it will be another alpine discipline," he said. "It's the same group of skiers that are coming through now on junior alpine programmes."

So British ski racing will wait on tenterhooks as its organisational and financial future hangs in the balance.

The crossroads are here. The wrong turn now could see skiing fall off Britain's Olympic radar for good.

Ski cross came hot on the heels of its snowboarding counterpart, which burst on to the Games programme in Turin - and was an instant hit, thanks in no small part to Lindsey Jacobellis' infamous showboating which cost her Olympic gold.

Where once the International Olympic Committee and the freestyle movement eschewed one another - they are now very much the best of buddies with half-pipe and ski/snowboard cross firmly established.

In four years' time at Sochi in Russia another freestyle event - slopestyle - has a very good chance of being included .

If it is successful, Britain would have an excellent chance of a medal as Bristol's Jenny Jones is a double X Games gold medallist in the event.

Jenny Jones has won back-to-back X-Games titles in slopestyle. Photo: Getty

Jones will be 33 when the Sochi Olympics come around but would dearly love to represent GB if she is injury-free and still at the top of her game.

A month ago, she became the first Brit to win back-to-back titles at the X Games - which is an invite-only event for the world's top freestyle skiers and snowboarders.

To put it into context, Shaun White (who has won the Olympic snowboard half-pipe at the last two Games) is the four-time slopestyle winner in the annual event held in Aspen, Colorado.

"From a purely selfish point of view I would like to see Jenny Jones competing on the biggest stage, the Winter Olympics," BBC snowboard commentator Ed Leigh told me.

"She is one of the best snowboarders Britain has produced and it would be fantastic to see her event included in a Winter Games."

Slopestyle sees competitors head down a course which has rails, boxes and jumps and they are judged on the their run and the difficulty level of the tricks they execute.

There is plenty of race footage if you search on the internet. If you want to see Jones, and Winter Olympian Ben Kilner (he finished 18th in the half-pipe in Vancouver) and competes in slopestyle, they will be at the Brits - the British freestyle ski and snowboard championships, in Laax, Switzerland from 21-28 March.

Leigh added: "Slopestyle deserves to get into the Olympics because it is much more relevant to modern snowboarding than parallel giant slalom, which pretty much has the same guys racing who were there in Nagano in 1998 and Salt Lake City in 2002.

"PGS is a poor cousin of alpine skiing and it's not a progressive part of snowboarding like slopestyle is.

"Snowboard cross and ski cross have proved immensely popular since their inclusion and If the Olympic movement wants to remain contemporary, then their goal should be to get both ski and board slopestyle in the 2014 Games in Sochi.

"If they need any sports to make way, in my opinion the PGS should go in snowboarding and aerials in skiing."

It seems slopestyle's inclusion is not just a pipe dream - pardon the pun - as the sport has powerful allies who have seen its popularity rise and realise its importance in engaging the audience - especially the younger generation.

Marcel Looze, snowboard director at the International Ski Federation, told me: "I am definitely pushing slopestyle for Sochi."

And Christophe Dubi, the International Olympic Committee's sports director, said: "Slopestyle is an event we will consider adding. This is something we see in every resort across Europe, America and Asia and we could consider it in future."

While Jones heads the British pack at the moment, the country also boasts a number of potential slopestyle stars including Jamie Nicholls and Nate Kearn in snowboarding and Paddy Graham and Murray Buchan in skiing.

Brits organiser Stuart Brass said: "We've got the cream of the crop when it comes to up-and-coming talent in slopestyle, so if it was to become an Olympic event it would certainly be good news for Britain."

The wheels to make slopestyle eligible for the 2014 Games are already in motion as in February it was included at a World Cup event for the first time.

It will also need to feature in two FIS World Championships - and next year's snowboard gig in Spain is being touted for this.

It looks like the future is very definitely freestyle. Could it provide Britain with their first Winter Olympic medal on snow?

THUMBS UP ... for the unseasonal warm weather that allowed Vancouver's fans to sit outside and drink coffee. Some of the cherry blossom in town has already sprung and it was t-shirts only for a few gloriously warm days in the middle of the Olympics.

THUMBS DOWN ... for the impact it had on a couple of the venues - Cypress Mountain especially. It seems, however, as if the competition was eventually even and no athlete has claimed it was unfair.

THUMBS UP ... for Shaun White who did something no-one else can do and reinforced his status as a one-off.

THUMBS DOWN ... for the 'cross' events where there seems little link between talent and result and the whole event feels like a one-off.

THUMBS UP ... for no positive drug tests. I am not one of those who believe no positive returns equals no cheating with performance enhancing drugs, but I am happier that there seems to be less use of them than in previous Winter Games.

THUMBS DOWN ... for those who, having jumped on the bandwagon that the Olympics are all about drugs, now seem not to notice the reverse of their logic when it isn't a story.

THUMBS UP ... for Team GB's Amy Williams - who will be the shining light of British winter sport for many a year to come.

THUMBS DOWN ... for Team GB in general. Yes, one gold medal is a step on from Turin, when the team took one silver, but we should not let a sidestep up to the middle of one podium in one sport detract from the miss after miss in several others. The athletes themselves will be disappointed and so should we be.

THUMBS UP ... for Sarah Lindsay in taking the end of her career (on a bizarre official decision at the short track skating) with a degree of maturity.

THUMBS DOWN ... on the fans who showered the same referee with thousands of death threats when he disqualified a Korean skater, meaning he had to spend the rest of his Olympics accompanied by a security guard.

Thumbs up for Vonn's achievement but don't forget Bjoerndalen's. Photo: Getty

THUMBS UP ... for Lindsey Vonn, who converted potential into gold in the downhill.

THUMBS DOWN ... for the media that seemingly missed Wang Meng, Ole Einar Bjoerndalen or Andre Lange because they were not such good material for the Swimsuit Edition of Sports Illustrated.

THUMBS UP ... for hordes of hard-working, polite and patient volunteers around the Olympic venues.

THUMBS DOWN ... for the decision to equip those volunteers with just enough information for that particular job and no more. I've lost count of the number of times I have asked one about something and had to be referred to another.

THUMBS UP ... for the US network that got the first interview with speed skater Sven Kramer as he stepped off the ice at the Richmond Oval having won a gold medal.

THUMBS DOWN ... for then asking him: "Can you tell us who you are and what you have won?" Kramer said "no" and wandered away.

THUMBS UP ... for the security assessment that only one in 10 people need to have their bags put through the scanner at every Olympic venue when they go in.

THUMBS DOWN ... for the realisation that London won't take the same view.

THUMBS UP ...for a funding strategy that delivers results for home athletes on home soil.

THUMBS DOWN ... that the name of it ("Own the Podium") somehow put a dampener on the best host nation performance at any Winter Games ever.

THUMBS UP ... for Vancouver. At times it was saddled with issues beyond its control, but it came through with red and white flags flying.

THUMBS DOWN ... we have to wait more than two years for London's turn.

Multi-Olympic veterans to whom I've spoken are in awe of it. Even Canadians seem occasionally taken aback. Vancouver is a city painted red and white, partying long and loud into every night on the crest of a wave of national fervour. Each gold medal is a new excuse for Canada to celebrate the fact of its existence.

I have sat and watched as floods of fans transformed empty venues into a seething mass of maple leaves - nowhere more so than the Olympic ice hockey arena, Canada Hockey Place, for the women's gold medal game on Thursday.

Enclosed arenas amplify noise at the best of times, and the crescendo as the Canadian team took to the ice must have made the home team feel 100ft tall. It is hard to recall one fan who did not turn up in national colours.

That has been replicated at every venue, in every event, and out on the streets no matter the day of the week. Is that simply what happens to Olympic host cities, or has this been a peculiarly Canadian phenomenon? Will London 2012 feel like this?

Canadian supporters raise the roof for their women's hockey team. Photo: Getty Images

Any public place in Canada is operating beyond fever pitch as these Games slowly reach a close. On one occasion, we were treated to impromptu renditions of the Canadian national anthem three times in one cacophonously patriotic half-hour.

Queues of Canadian fans waiting to get into venues exhibit similar characteristics. Anywhere a crowd of more than four or five gathers, it is not long before chants of "Go! Canada! Go!" are struck up, to the ringing of cowbells and honking of passing horns.

"The most important thing is the enthusiasm of the people," said International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge earlier in the week. "I have never seen a city embrace the Games in this way."

Team GB chef de mission Andy Hunt added: "All of us have been totally amazed by the way the Canadian nation has been absolutely entwined with these Games. The challenge for us now is to make sure the home team is really at the centre of the London 2012."

And therein lies a critical difference. The Canadian national sport is ice hockey, and there was never any doubt that the home hockey teams would be front and centre of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games. Every second Canadian on the streets is wearing a hockey jersey - the other is wearing the Canadian flag as a cape.

The women's team have already made themselves heroes and the entire nation will stop what it is doing, don the national colours and watch, impatiently, when the men take to the ice in Sunday's final. Canadians will wait for the chance, the right, to celebrate their status as the finest hockey nation in the world.

This is a country so secure in its patriotism, so comfortable with its international reputation for "nice", that when the American women appeared close to tears collecting their silver medals, Canadian fans thundered "U-S-A! U-S-A!" in sympathy. (Would English football fans do that for players from a rival team?)

Whether it's as easy to be secure in feeling British is a different question - one you could write books on, let alone an Olympic blog. But Britain as a sports team has always felt like a tricky concept for much of its population to grasp.

Britain's constituent nations play the sports about which they are most passionate as separate entities - England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Football would be the British equivalent to ice hockey in Canada, but how many people are fans of British football? Type "Team GB" into a search engine and on the first page of results you will find a website dedicated to opposing a British football team at London 2012.

Fans of football, cricket and rugby, which many British people would list first if asked to name sports they follow, are English, Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh. They are unlikely to identify themselves, first and foremost, as British when it comes to sport.

Among British sports fans you find some of the most passionate supporters in the world. Think of the Scottish football team's Tartan Army, or the English cricket team's Barmy Army. And British fans will go nuts for any successful GB athlete and back them all the way to the podium.

But the way that manifests itself may look very different to the enthusiasm for the act of being Canadian which home supporters here exhibit.

You might argue it will be success in the events themselves which inspires the public, but that hasn't seemed the case here. On the first night of the Games, drenched at the foot of Cypress Mountain in the wake of moguls skier Jenn Heil's failure to secure gold for Canada, her legions of supporters were as vocal and boisterously Canadian as those victorious fans at the women's hockey.

For Canada, it feels as though the entire Games has been an outlet for a national consciousness in existence for many, many decades. The raw, patriotic energy was there, and the Winter Olympics simply channelled it to spectacular ends.

Does the challenge for London 2012 organisers lie in channelling the patriotism of individual nations into that British team, or in generating that patriotism in the first place?

Will Trafalgar Square become a living, breathing carpet of red, white, and blue, or will the London Games be an entirely different affair? Will being British at London 2012 feel like being Canadian at Vancouver 2010? And is it necessarily bad if it doesn't? I'm looking forward to finding out.

I was born with two left feet and no sense of rhythm, so the idea that I'd become one of Britain's "Dance Champions" would be on the extreme end of improbability. But it's happened, and this week I was among the delegates at a Dance Summit in the City of London alongside the likes of Arlene Phillips, Lisa Snowdon, Angela Rippon and Mark Foster.

To avoid any ambiguity, I should explain that being a Dance Champion means that we champion the cause of dance in the UK - not that we've won a prize. And in fairness there are some other people more like me in the group: our chairman is Rod Aldridge who's a successful businessman and we have colleagues from the Arts Council and the Central Council for Physical Recreation as well as some patient civil servants in attendance.

The aim is straightforward: "to inspire, enable and empower people of all ages and backgrounds to try dance" - and to help meet the national targets of getting more people involved in physical activity.

So my involvement isn't, thankfully, because of potential in the Pasa Doble. It's because it ties in with the sport and activity legacy around London 2012 that I've talked about here before - and also, inevitably, because there was an idea at one stage that we should concoct a national dance event that might have links to the Olympic opening ceremony.

I'm pleased to say that the expert choreographers and I are as one here: the biggest event on the planet is not the place for amateur dancers, and much as we love him it's not the right venue for the John Sergeant experience.

But there's a lot we can do. The BBC's Sport Academy included dance as part of its repetoire for keeping fit, and the evidence suggests there are millions of people who wouldn't take up sport but might well be persuaded to dance if they could find the right environment.

Worries - and I know this only too well - include: "will I make a complete idiot of myself?" "am I the wrong shape for dance?" and even "what do I wear if I turn up for a dance class?" - with those being the kind of questions we need to address if people are going to have a bash.

Miguel Doforo, Darren Bennett, Angela Rippon, Mark Foster, Arlene Phillips and Rod Aldridge attend the launch

Now, this may seem a long way away from the 100 metres and the brilliant sport we hope to see a couple of years from now, and you could argue activity through dance is something that should be happening anyway - irrespective of the fact we're the host country for the OIympics. But what I witnessed at the Dance Summit and I pick up frequently is a growing sense in the UK that 2012 is a special year and it does have the potential to inspire people above and beyond the routine.

Sometimes this can be represented by people feeling grumpy if they suspect they're being left out: there's been some crossness in the Dance world that the Cultural Olympiad didn't seem to have much dance in it. But at its best it's a feeling that this is a chance of a lifetime to do something uplifting and different, and if we can't create the right spirit in Britain in 2012 then we might as well give up.

So we'll see how dance fits into that, as we continue the quest to define the sporting legacy for the nation too. This remains not as straightforward as it might be because as in many sectors there's almost always good work underway at grassroots level across the country, but it struggles to achieve national impact and often there are overlaps between different 'official' bodies and problems in co-ordination. "Dance Champions" is one attempt to address that.

But the question that's been nagging away as I've been writing this is can I say I'll have a go myself? Still not sure, to be honest. But I just used the Dance Champions website to see whether it had any classes near me, and it does - and as I'm now firmly in middle age a group called "Mature Moves" caught my eye. The cheering thing is I'm still too young for it: it says it's for people between 60 and 100. So I'm afraid I'll have to cede my place at that one for eight more years at least.