RIO 2016; the Olympics, the greatest show on earth? Maybe not this time around.

Not with the fall-out from Russia’s state-funded pill-popping party still causing a stink, or, with the blatant commercialisation of the Games through the inclusion of sports that really shouldn’t be there. Or, for me, especially after London 2012. Rio won’t come close to matching that. There, I’ve said it. But we’ll still watch.

Because Team GB will, as we have become used to, return home to Heathrow with a new generation of medal winners, all funded by us, and ready to cash in further with appearances on Saturday early evening game shows, reality TV programmes and adverts. Who knew Chris Hoy liked Bran Flakes let alone that he could pedal a bike a kilometre in around a minute?

But good luck to them. They’ve worked hard, harder than you might ever know. So they are entitled to make good from their exploits.

Since Lottery funding came in to play, so Team GB’s professionalism and return on investment has improved greatly, almost unrecognisably, from what had gone before.

Before state assistance (and I don’t mean the Russian variety), and in particular the three post-war decades, the British mind-set was all very Corinthian: a team of folk giving their all, hopeful at best, and verging on the Alf Tupper approach to self-preparation, or should that be self-harm.

Today’s athletes would have dieticians (I’m not sure if there is such a thing as a drinketicians, but it sounds good) monitoring every morsel or swig that passed their highly-tuned lips. Calories, carbs, fats all weighed in and measured out. But it wasn’t always so.

Take distance walker Don Thompson. His bid over 50km at Melbourne in 1956 when he missed his drink of choice at the final filling station, his own heady cocktail of one pint lemon barley water, fortified with a dozen spoonful of sugar and an equal measure of salt tablets.

Fatigue, dehydration and cramp set in, and Thompson returned from Oz disappointed. However, his failure spurred him on for the challenge four years later in Rome, helped by his relentless fitness regime, and probably several buckets of his "tonic".

Knowing that heat would be a major factor in Rome, Thompson couldn’t afford the warm-weather training so readily available to the current generation of professional competitors.

Instead, he trained in the bathroom at his parents home, keeping the bath topped up with boiling water, walking on the spot kitted out in his tracksuit, a heavy jacket, with towels cladding the door and windows to stop heat escaping, and with the humidity levels driven even higher by the use of a wall heater and a paraffin stove.

Somehow, I don’t think Jessica Ennis-Hill and Katarina Johnson-Thompson will have encountered anything quite like that before flying down to Rio.

Don Thompson, on the other hand, achieved peak fitness and more importantly, built up a resistance to the dreaded heat and fatigue, powering through the dizzy spells, he thought were brought on by the boiling temperatures. His dedication paid off, gold in Rome.

It could have been so different. Particularly, when he later found out the dizziness was brought on by the carbon monoxide fumes he was gulping in from the stove.

Stories of sacrifice, by individuals, families and even towns and villages, to send their young hopefuls abroad are plentiful. Indeed, away back in 1976, as a schoolboy (before you say otherwise), I contributed to the cause, coining in much-needed pennies – and pounds – by doing sit-ups, 77 in a minute, beaten only by a boy nicknamed Skittle who was a karate kid weighing four stone dripping wet.

I had the bruises on my feet (from the wall bars that pinned them) for weeks, black and blue and even purple, all to help British flag-wavers to gold, silver and bronze. They did, but not to the numbers that were anticipated.

On the track, only Brendan Foster, Big Bren, came good, and even then it was only a bronze. Pathetic by today’s standard. But we still hit gold in Montreal, most notably for me, through two athletes.

One was David Wilkie, a Scot born in Ceylon (it wasn’t even Sri Lanka then), who did all his serious training in Florida, swimming for the Miami Hurricanes, his University swim team. Compare that professionalism to preparing in his parents bathroom.

The other was Jim Fox, REME sergeant Jim Fox, who not only proved how good he was at huntin’, fishin’ and a shootin’ (actually it was horse riding, fencing, running, swimming and shooting) but also beat the greatest Olympic cheat of all time, one Boris Onishchenko.

Fox spotted Onishchenko was scoring "hits" in the fencing when nowhere near his opponent. Officials found the Russian had, indeed, a button that triggered a score when pressed.

Onishchenko was kicked out, Fox, a fit and proper gentleman of Her Majesty’s Forces, took the ultimate prize in the team event along with Danny Nightingale and Adrian Parker.

Others will do the same in Rio – although that is what they are paid for. But will their efforts better those unexpected amateur wins, especially those delivered amidst a backdrop of Heath Robinson fitness room or a cheating Russian, with a storyline from James Bond and an electronic gizmo that could have come straight from Maplins?

I very much doubt it . . .