Life is one crazy spin cycle for those Beijing Olympic medal-winners, and no mistaking. If they’re not scooping up New Year Honours and seeing in 2009 aboard HMS Belfast alongside Alesha Dixon, Simply Red and Craig Revel Horwood live on BBC One, they’re sitting on the famous aluminium high chairs (the kitchen stools of truth) with Chris Tarrant for the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Olympic special. Talk about in demand.

By my calculation, Zac Purchase alone has spent more time on television this Christmas than Adrian Chiles and Take That combined. Sir Chris Hoy has been prominent over the Hogmanay period like no other Scotsman since Stanley Baxter. And Rebecca Adlington has officially replaced Amy Winehouse as the world’s most photographed young woman.

Just a tantalising glimpse of what it must be like to be at the centre of this dizzying storm of attention was provided by Sarah Webb, Purchase’s partner on Millionaire. (You remember her. Blonde? In a boat? That’s the one. Or one of the ones.)

With earnings for charity hovering precariously on the £100 mark, Webb and Purchase were asked to state the area of expertise of Anna Wintour, the Editor-in-chief of American Vogue. Webb had a hunch that Wintour might have something to do with fashion, but the pair asked the audience, just to check. Only when the audience had confirmed Webb’s notion did the sailor confess that she had had supper with Wintour on the Friday before filming. “At least I think I might have done,” Webb added.

So this is the post-gold world. It’s a place in which you might have dined with Anna Wintour a couple of nights ago, but you couldn’t be absolutely positive about it. And in which, if you did dine with her, you didn’t spend much time talking about what she did.

Maybe it was tiredness (quite understandable, in the circumstances), but Webb and Purchase set the bar fairly low for themselves, quiz-wise. “We’d like £50,000, wouldn’t we?” Purchase said. At this level, surely, it’s all about desire. Or, to put it another way, it’s about who wants to be a millionaire more. A clearly startled Tarrant asked: “Where’s that competitive drive that won you gold medals?” “You practise for gold medals,” Purchase explained.

The implication that you don’t practise for Millionaire might have struck some viewers as a little casual, but it was also reassuring news in the context of Victoria Derbyshire’s shocking revelation that competitors on Celebrity Mastermind have tested positive for crib sheets.

“Crib sheets” doesn’t mean the answers, by the way. It’s important that we all get that clear, before this scandal bubbles out of control completely. “Crib sheets” just means a little helpful prodding into areas where the answers might be found. The distinction is an important one, not least for our faith in knowledge tests at the sport/celebrity interface.

On Millionaire, blessedly above these controversies and clearly entirely uncoached — you could even say a little stiff — the rower and the sailor dragged themselves to £20,000, rapidly torching lifelines along the way, only to dump £19,000 by gambling on a question about the location of Roskilde (Denmark, not Ireland).

Christine Ohuruogu and Steve Williams fared little better. To be frank, a big cash-fall didn’t seem to be in the offing when the opening question (pick the month that contains the Spring Bank Holiday from a list including February, March, April and May) sent the runner and the rower into a far-reaching debate that could easily have taken the programme to a second edition. Yet somehow they held on to reach £10,000, again with the help of all three lifelines, before backing out in order not to risk dropping £9,000 on how long Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats lasted in the West End (21 long years).

Liz Johnson and Darren Kenny, the Paralympians, also got only as far as £10,000 for their nominated charities, meaning that this entire special edition set the programme back a mere £21,000 — a cheap night out by Millionaire standards.

Let’s be realistic, though. There’s no shame here for our brave Olympians. Imagine. You were born about 15 minutes ago. You have spent almost every second since in a boat. How are you supposed to know that the first name of Dennis Weaver’s character in McCloud, the 1970s television series, was Sam? Anyway, these people aren’t here to provide answers to the quiz questions of today. They are here to become the quiz questions of tomorrow.

And while we’re thinking about questions, how do you pronounce Ohuruogu? Is it a) Areeogog, b) Glooguru, or c) a noise you might make if you happened to sneeze and shut your finger in a drawer at the same time? Answer: all three, if you happen to be Chris Tarrant.

And by the way, the correct answer to the question about the Spring Bank Holiday is May. It’s like Tarrant often says, though: they’re only easy when you know the answers.