Every four years athletes from the home nations shelve fierce rivalries to compete together under the Union Jack, but what does it really mean for people watching at home to be British during the Olympics?

Anthropologists at the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford have attempted to discover how the event affected the sense of national identity.

More than two thirds of British people in the YouGov poll could immediately recall their favourite Olympic moment.

The most popular was Steve Redgrave, the rower, winning his fifth Olympic gold medal at the 2000 Games in Sydney.

The double gold medal for Kelly Holmes in Athens in 2004 was second, followed by Daley Thompson's world-record breaking decathlon gold medal in Los Angeles in 1984.

The findings of the survey, commissioned by British Airways, suggested that the Olympics still had the power to unite the English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish.

The achievement of Redgrave provoked the greatest sense of pride in being British. The moment in 1972 when Mary Peters, the Northern Irish pentathlon and shot put specialist, won gold was recalled with equal reverence in England, however.

Thompson, born to a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother, was seen by more men to embody Britishness than Holmes, whose father was born in Jamaica but whose mother is English.

“Although everyone is saying Britishness is dead, the concept clearly still has something going for it,” Peter Marsh, SIRC director, said.