Our sporting heroes are worth their weight in gold

While the athletes were demonstrating British values of decency and fair play, the Royal Bank of Scotland was counting the cost of selling dodgy financial instruments to small businesses; Standard Chartered was being fingered for allegedly helping Iran finance its nuclear programme; Barclays was still in the dock for fixing Libor interest rates; and the Trade Minister, Lord Green, stood accused of condoning money laundering when he was boss of HSBC. Oh, and none of them are lending to small businesses, needless to say, as they sit on hundreds of billions of printed money under the Bank of England's quantitative easing programme. Which has a lot to do with the Bank of England's zero growth rate forecast.

But while it is a cheap shot comparing bankers with athletes, there's no harm in a bit of nostalgia for the virtues of Olympic sportsmanship. Britain has fallen in love with its athletes this week, and the values embodied by Sir Chris, every mother's favourite son, as he staggers under the weight of gold medals. British cynicism has been put on hold for the duration, and we've all been seduced by the Chariots of Fire mythology. "Inspire a generation" is the official slogan of the London Olympics and somehow it doesn't seem as vapid as it did a year ago. Athletes are being held up as role models for young people who back then were setting English cities alight in a very different way. And fair enough: no-one should detract from the achievements of Team GB – they are authentic heroes in an age of vacuous celebrity and ruthless materialism.

However, the moral balance sheet isn't quite as straightforward as it might appear. Bankers are very much into sport, as we all know from the RBS branding all over rugby matches. It's no accident that the City loves sporting metaphors. Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs are famous for hiring athletes, ostensibly because of their discipline and capacity for hard work. Though I'm not sure how having 27-inch thighs helps when you are short-selling commodity stocks. It is rather that bankers like to flatter themselves as winners in the great financial race and sponsor sporting events to flatter their businesses. Sir Fred spent over £200m on sporting sponsorship during his tenure at RBS.

And of course, His Royal Hoyness wouldn't be on his throne had it not been for sponsorship money: £27 million has gone into coaching, equipping, massaging, and psyching the British Olympic cyclists. Money enhances performance better than any other drug. The National Lottery alone has injected nearly £300m into British Olympic sportsmen and women in the last two decades. It is as naive to believe that athletes have innate moral superiority, as it is to think that they are uninterested in financial reward. Usain Bolt earns over £20m a year, according to the website Paywizard, and even man-of-the-people Bradley Wiggins earns £1.5m. Oor Andy Murray nets £7.7m, and since he was 19 he has been a "brand ambassador" for – you've guessed it – the Royal Bank of Scotland. These runners posturing to the cameras on the starting grid don't wear the Nike "swoosh" for nothing. Athletes are becoming more like rock stars and sports merchandising is a multi-billion industry.

There was a time when Olympic athletes were supposed to be amateurs, in the best sense of the word. When Baron de Coubertin established the International Olympics Committee in 1894, it was to promote sport as a hobby, not a profession. It was considered unfair even to train. Until the 1980s, professional sportsmen were barred from competing in the Olympics altogether, and the Olympic movement shunned commercial sponsorship. Now it earns billions from TV rights and marketing partnerships with brands like Coca-Cola who pay millions of pounds for the privilege. Which is why people were told they wouldn't be allowed into the London stadium wearing Pepsi T-shirts.

And while the stadia are mercifully free of advertising, the athletes have become vehicles for brand recognition. Curiously, the restriction on paid athletes lingers on in only two sports: boxing and football. But everywhere else, money is in play. This may be inevitable, given the demands of international competition, but I find it regrettable nevertheless. My own sporting hero is the flying Scot Graeme Obree who made his bike out of washing machine parts and went on to set two world hour records in 1993 before the authorities banned his riding style. He didn't need £27m.

No, this doesn't detract from Sir Chris's achievement. Britain's most decorated Olympic athlete has anyway paid fulsome tribute to Obree, who he says inspired him to take up the velodrome. Sir Chris is a sporting hero of a different era, who is unapologetic about his professionalism. There is no virtue in coming last, in being what he calls "plucky failures". The Real McHoy rides a £15,000 bike designed in a wind tunnel and shod with those "magic wheels". But watching him fend of the challenge of the German ace, Maximilian Levy, in the keirin you had to concede that it was muscle fibre rather than carbon fibre that won him his sixth gold medal.

In the end, sport is more about the spectator than the sportsman or woman. Athletes are celebrated precisely because they offer moral certainty that is lacking elsewhere. We project onto them the values of fairness, discipline and teamwork that we aspire to in our daily lives. That is what the British people were celebrating on their various medal mountains across the country. We see the best of ourselves in our athletes, and even if they sometimes fail to match up to our expectations, or succumb to the lure of celebrity, the celebration of that decency makes us a better nation. At least for the next four days.