IIs exercise good for you? I’m beginning to wonder. Before the Olympics, I spoke to Andy Hodge, one of our greatest rowers. He told me how, plagued by injury and illness, he was fighting to compete in his third Games in Rio. “Every day I expected my body to break down,” he said, and that helped him develop what he describes as a “relieving psychology,” which goes like this: “Just keep going until your body breaks down, and when that happens, you’ve tried properly.” Relieving? Hmm, if it gets to the point where the idea of ​​destroying your body gives you anything remotely like relief, then you’re living in a world most of us don’t live in, and living a life few doctors would recommend. On the start line in Rio, Hodge said to himself, “I’m going to go out and really destroy my body. That’s my only mission for today.” And a few minutes later, he had won his third Olympic gold.

We often talk about the power of the Olympics to encourage children to take up sport, and that’s great. But there’s a slight dissonance here. Do we really want them to be as obsessed with it as those whose genius and dedication we so admire?

Hodges’ physical exhaustion was always on my mind as I covered the rowing events from Paris. Watching the British duo of Tom George and Oliver Wynne-Griffith lead the entire race, only to be beaten at the finish line, I had a new thought: it doesn’t matter what it does to the athletes’ bodies; I’m beginning to wonder if it does us spectators any good too. The stress is real and relentless, especially during the Olympics. After shouting at horses all day at the Galway races, I went for a quiet beer and ended up shouting at a swimmer, Daniel Wiffen, whose gold medal-winning 800m swim was being televised. I wonder what that boy has done to his body and mind over the years. It’s hard not to hear Michael Phelps’ famous lament that his life consisted of eating, sleeping and swimming and not much else.

And the stress hits us poor spectators with all its might when it comes to sports indoors and outdoors, in and on the water, that involve throwing, catching, hitting, winning and losing. Sports you barely understand because you only get interested in them every four years. Sports you can’t believe anyone would be cruel enough to think them up. Synchronized diving, for example. Who on earth has looked at a diver performing incredible twists and somersaults and thought, “I know, are we going to force them to team up, to perform these miracles together, and give them a lower grade if they’re not in perfect unison”? What are we going to do to these people? And to the rest of us watching through our fingers.

One moment we’re gasping for breath at the sight of a distraught Chinese girl who has just jumped clean off her trampoline, the next we’re jumping for joy because Britain’s Bryony Page has won the gold medal. I drove my mum somewhere so we could both have a break from it all, but we ended up listening to the Croatian radio commentary on the Croatia v Greece water polo match – a sport whose rules none of us know, and yet we were stuck on the M1, cursing the referees’ decisions as much as the traffic. I say it again, this can’t be healthy. And on the same weekend that the Olympic agony ends, England’s football season starts. Where exactly am I supposed to find the strength? I search for some exonerating psychology, but nothing comes to mind.