No sooner had Boris Johnson joked about dropping the Olympic flag as it is handed over to London this weekend than Great Britain’s athletes were being disqualified for messing up a relay baton switch at the Bird’s Nest stadium. But it was a rare slip for Team GB, who secured their seventeenth gold medal yesterday, with the promise of more to come in the last three days of competition.

Off Qingdao, Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson won Britain’s fourth gold in the sailing, in the Star class event. Top of the charts in rowing and cycling, Britain has proved that it is unequalled when it comes to sports that can be done sitting down.

There had been high hopes that Phillips Idowu would add to the haul by the time he landed on his backside in the triple jump, but he had to settle for a silver medal, beaten by five centimetres by Nelson Évora, of Portugal. “It hurts - I’m upset - I came here to achieve a lot more and I just fell short,” Idowu said. At 29, these Games may have represented his best chance of gold, but Idowu was adamant that he would be back for London 2012.

Once he had overcome his exhaustion, David Davies was also disappointed not to have finished on top of the podium rather than second in the ten-kilometre marathon swim. He had led for most of the course but took a wrong line towards the finish and was beaten by Maarten van der Weijden, the Dutch swimmer who had lymphatic leukaemia diagnosed seven years ago.

Davies will also be back in four years and the success of the British athletes here has, according to Johnson, the Mayor of London, persuaded “Olympo-sceptics” of the merits of the London Games despite the estimated cost of £9.3 billion. Johnson arrived in Beijing yesterday before the formal handover ceremonies on Sunday.

There could be several more gold medal-winners to acclaim by the time that these Olympics close. In the canoeing today, Tim Brabants is strongly fancied in the K-1 1,000 metres flatwater final.

With a haul of 40 medals - and an unexpected third place in the table behind China and the United States - Britain are already guaranteed to beat the Government/UK Sport “stretch target” of 41 because three boxers, David Price, Tony Jeffries and James DeGale, all contest semi-finals today knowing that they will go home with at least a bronze.

Hopes of the men’s 4 x 100 metres relay team defending their Olympic title were dashed when they botched the final changeover. The US quartet were also disqualified in the heats.

A successful Games head towards their climax this weekend but, as if to prove that you cannot keep everyone happy, there was widespread astonishment yesterday when Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, chose to criticise Usain Bolt, the mesmerising star of the track, for supposedly unsportsman-like celebrations.

The Jamaican, who broke world records in both the 100 metres and 200 metres finals, has sprinkled star-dust on these Games to help them to go down as among the most memorable in the history of the Olympics, so Rogge’s carping was utterly misguided. And there we were thinking that Sepp Blatter, the president of Fifa, was the gold medal-winner when it comes to sport’s administrators being out of touch with the real world.