Simon Barnes is blogging from Beijing every day. Follow his Games here

Sometimes, when you watch an athlete win a gold medal at the Olympic Games, it is as if it was the culmination of years of perfect planning. There was, for example, a glorious inevitability about the way Michael Phelps, of the United States, won his first gold medal here on Sunday. The event had been plotted and planned across vast expanses of time with absolute and perfect thoroughness, and it reached a point when nothing whatsoever could change it. It was always going to happen.

But it was quite different yesterday when Rebecca Adlington, of Great Britain, won her gold medal in the 400metres freestyle. This gold was the culmination of a few seconds of blinding, blazing, incandescent opportunity. A door opened for a vanishingly small space of time and Adlington wriggled through it like an eel. The race favourites looked back in complete bafflement. How the hell did she do that? That was our race to win.

It wasn't, though. It was their race to lose, and lose it they did. Katie Hoff, of the United States, and Federica Pellegrini, of Italy, went into the race as favourites, eyed each other and, wary of blasting ahead and getting hunted down, decided to play it canny. So they both went too slow. That played into the hands of those with better endurance, and Adlington can endure all right.

Olympics updates direct to your mobile

Put the Beijing Games in your pocket

Britain's medal hopes soar and dive

Rebecca Adlington wins swimming gold but Tom Daley, the 14-year-old, falls out with his diving partner

• Nicole Cooke prepares to return to scene of greatest triumph

• Women add to British rowing success

• David Price must make size matter against world's best super-heavyweight

Multimedia

• Simon Barnes in Beijing

• Bring back the tug-of-war

• Top 100 Olympic athletes of all time

Related Links

• Phelps proves he is in a world of his own

• Something in the air tonight in Beijing

• Phelps keeps his cool as history beckons

As others faded, so Adlington did not. She came hammering down that final length like a female otter in pursuit of a particularly tasty fish. Hoff was that fish, and she was chased, caught and devoured. And so we had the first British women's swimming Olympic gold medal for 48 years and two seats away from me, a lovely and statuesque woman of a certain age was on her feet

and cheering and swapping an ever-so-slightly teary embrace with my Times colleague, Craig Lord. “I'll have to stop calling you champ,” I said to her.

“Too long!” she said, again and again. “Too long!”

The Olympic Games in Rome in 1960 were the first sporting event that swam into my consciousness, and Anita Lonsbrough was my first sporting hero. I watched, in a transport of delight, on the black-and-white telly at my parents' home in Streatham, as a lovely and statuesque girl, just 19, won the 200metres breaststroke, one of only two gold medals that Britain won at those Games.

And I thought then that sport was something really rather marvellous: oh brave new world that has such creatures in it! It was a vision of perfection that has stayed with me for ever. It is probably Anita's fault that I am in the decidedly silly business of sports writing.

There was another vision of perfection yesterday, and it was a piece of glorious opportunism: give me a quarter-chance and by God, I'll take it. That left me with another bit of joy to write about, another bit of brilliance, another bit of perfection. I don't suppose Anita did me such a bad turn.

Taking the plung at a tender age

I remember from boyhood seaside holidays a little lad who always asked his big bruv's advice before doing anything: “Shall I go from that rock, Rich? Shall I dive in now, Rich?” I was taken back to those days as Tom Daley lined up with Blake Aldridge on the ten-metre diving platform for the men's synchronised competition yesterday. Shall I dive in now, Blake? So in they went together and Daley, at 14 years and 81 days, becomes the youngest Briton to take part in the Olympic Games since Ken Lester, who coxed in the rowing in Rome in 1960.