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We thought he was a champ but instead he’s a choker. Is Hamilton the new Henman? Hopefully he’ll come good but this week’s hat trick of sporting disasters has yet again forced us to ask ourselves whether losing is now hardwired into our national psyche.

It’s not that the British want to lose. We don’t. We’d dearly love to win. It’s just that we no longer expect to win. In fact we have become rather too accustomed to defeat. The imperial myth of British sporting invincibility has long since given way to a narrative of failure and disappointment, a story of Gazza’s tears, ‘thirty years of hurt’, missed penalties, and broken metatarsals. (And, after last weekend, we can add disallowed tries and faulty gearboxes to that list).

When we do win some medals we’re so unused to success that we celebrate excessively. There are open-top bus parades all round, even for the runners-up. And we dish out MBEs like confetti. World Cup winner Alan Ball had to wait 34 years for his gong. Paul Collingwood got one after a single Ashes Test in which he scored just 17 runs.

So why has victory become like a foreign country to us? It can’t be the lack of investment. We’ve built academies and centres of excellence, we’ve restructured our sports governing bodies, we’ve doled out lottery grants, and we’ve imported foreign coaches. But still we keep producing flops. Why? Is it our affluent ‘culture of contentment’ that has robbed us of our sporting hunger? Sport is no longer the only route out of the ghetto but there’s no automatic read across from poverty to sporting success. Italy is the football World Cup holder. France churns out world class tennis players. These aren’t poor countries.

The answer is that, while losing isn’t in our genes, there are powerful cultural reasons why the dunce’s hat of failure fits us far more comfortably than the champion’s crown. Our touchy-feely, inclusive, therapy culture runs counter to the ethos of sporting excellence. We denigrate those values - such as ruthlessness, arrogance, ultra-competitiveness, obsessive dedication and monkish self-denial - that characterise a winning mentality. We frown on pushy parents who drive their children to succeed. We’re more bothered about damaging our kids’ self-esteem than instilling the will to succeed. And as long as we’d rather dish out consolation prizes than bollockings, then we should expect many more years of hurt to come.

Click here to read Patrick Kidd's response: Top 50 great British losers

A Battle of Ideas debate on "Are we a nation of sporting losers?" will take place on Sunday, October 28 at 10.00

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Duleep Allirajah is a sports columnist for Spiked