Chaps, chaps, chaps, chaps, chaps. Just before we have the Trafalgar Square parade, the Red Arrows flyby and the 487-gun salute for Dame Rebecca Adlington, Sir Chris Hoy and our other Lycra-clad golden Olympians, might I sound just the teensiest note of caution, just the winciest semiquaver of regret? We may have won the Olympics (and, let’s be honest, we did, because China used four-year-old gymnasts and America fielded a dolphin) but has anyone stopped to consider what we’ve lost?

All week I have walked, no, strutted, no, goose-stepped around like I’m the proud citizen of a sporting nation. This is, of course, because I am. As of last weekend I now belong to a country that is good at sport. A winning country. A country that isn’t always picked last in the playground, after the fat kid with the lisp and the speccy four eyes. This is not like the great Ashes victory of 2005. That felt like a dream, a fairy tale, a one-off (which of course it was).

This time it’s different. You have the super-cyclist Bradley Wiggins telling an interviewer he’d be disappointed with one gold, okay with two, happy with three. Just happy. You have the rowing girls crying because they managed only silver, and the Yngling girls saying: “We know we’re the best.” And, of course, you have Bryony Shaw swearing like Gordon Ramsay when she won Britain’s first Olympic medal in the women’s windsurfing. “I love my mum and dad. And my boyfriend. Blah, blah, blah. I am just so f****** happy.” Ker-pow! These people talk like winners. Sweary winners.

And this is the problem. Now we are a sporting nation, we’ve lost the one thing that kept our fragile society together: being rubbish at sport (and being able to laugh about it). We have lost the tearful, nonviolent group pub hugs. We have lost the communal shrugs of derision on the morning-after-national-humiliation train. There will be no more Eddie the Eagle.

With this Olympic gold rush, we have, to all intents and purposes, become Australian. Think what that means. We must now spend our lives backpacking, working in bars and irritating everyone else with our athletic prowess. Worse, we’re American. We’ll now have to invent sports that no one else can play to guarantee we’re No 1. We’ll have to hot-coach our children and call them losers when they don’t get a curling scholarship to an Ivy League university. We will have to chew gum and wear baseball caps and eat hot dogs and shout, “Come on, man,” and choke on a pretzel.

Is that what we really want? Until now I expected our national teams to lose and I was ecstatic when, every now and again, they didn’t. Americans expect to win and can’t stand it when they lose. They’ll even cheat statistics to convince themselves they’re No 1. If you don’t believe me, look at the American version of the Beijing medals table. They’ve ranked it by total medals rather than the official, proper, noncheating way – by golds – just so they’re ahead of China.

The real tragedy here is that the rest us were just beginning to take our lead, or lack thereof, from our sporting antiheroes. Last month it was revealed that many employers are dropping their recruitment criteria from a 2:1 to a 2:2 to “widen the talent pool”. Less spoddy, you see, the 2:2ers. Not winners but takers-part. Drank more beer. Had more girlfriends. Inhaled. Sure, they may not be the best person to explain quantum mechanics, but they’re much more fun at the Christmas party.

The 2:1ers who did manage to get highflying jobs are chucking them in.

They’re moving to villages with silly names in deepest, darkest Wiltshire to grow Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs and get to know the names of their children again.

All the others are becoming geography teachers, which I’m not saying is a nonOlympic career choice, but they get long holidays, job satisfaction and appalling pay.

I can also offer my own anecdotal evidence of how second-place Britain was gathering momentum. I have a Skoda. It is seven years old and it sounds and drives like a bus. Until a couple of years ago my better-paid peers had flash Audis and planet-eating Range Rovers. Now, I find myself arguing with them about who has the oldest, cheapest, most knackered car. Bangers are the latest in cool. They say, “I don’t need to be in the fast lane. My life is rich enough. I may even opt out of society altogether and go and live in a wood.”

It’s the same with mobile phones. Yes, a lot of people sit on the train revelling in their iPhones, but a lot of other people who could be gloating over iPhones are managing to get just as much pleasure from telling everyone they aren’t. “Haven’t renewed the contract in years,” they say. “I’m perfectly happy with this old brick. It phones people. It is enough.”

Fast-track careers, phone races, car envy and being the best dad at sports day were on the way out. Work-life balance, loafing, joie de vivre and growing ridiculous pigs were on the way in. We were becoming French, but in a good way. And now we’ve gone and won the sodding Olympics. We’ll get only two weeks’ holiday a year, we’ll call our children Kylie and Hank and we’ll have no sense of national pride in sporting disasters.

There is hope, though. The government, in a rare display of foresight, has reacted to events in Beijing by slashing Team GB’s budgets for 2012. No new inner tubes for Hoy. No new running shoes for Christine Ohuruogu. No paddles for anyone. Funding will come only from Bryony Shaw’s swear box.

And our relay team didn’t pass the baton. And Shanaze Reade fell off her BMX. And our useless, overpaid, diving footballers are still rubbish. And we’ll always have the weather to whinge about. We will hold firm.

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