KEY POINTS:
The Olympics will help some athletes sleep easy forever.
As for others, you just hope they manage to get over it.
Among the happiest athletes in history is Usain Bolt, the Jamaican who celebrated like a premiership footballer who had scored a goal in winning the 100m at
Beijing.
Flamboyance is not unknown among the world's finest sprinters, but the unusual part about Bolt's party trick is it started while he was completing the race.
The wind drag and balance problems associated with swivelling sideways and slapping the chest must be enormous for a sprinter, but Bolt turned the premier event into a stroll by slowing down to celebrate while still recording a world record time.
We'll presume, for now, that no nasty gremlins appear in Bolt's happy world when the drug test results come in. It's a major presumption to make considering Olympic sprinting history, but Bolt finished in the clear and remains there for now.
Valerie Vili was also able to celebrate early, turning down her last throw in the shot put to head joyously towards the stands. She looked confident of victory way before that.
There will be no "what ifs" gnawing away at Vili for years to come. A couple of seconds of marvellous work, a quick twirl and the explosion of energy, had seen everything fall into place.
It's a strange business for many of us, watching an event like the shot put. All the talk and expectations are boiled down into a few moments, where years of hard work must come together in a harmony that we can't understand.
It was even stranger for us, because it was very hard to tell the good throws from the bad using the markers on the field and Keith Quinn's commentary. Quinn also alternated Valerie's surname, between the maiden Adams and married Vili.
Vili knew the score though. Whatever lies ahead will always be easier for Vili knowing she got it totally right for the most important athletic day of her life.
Mahe Drysdale may never know whether he should laugh or cry at his Olympics bronze medal performance. The triple world champion will forever wonder about how a bug got into his system leaving him drained of energy at the end of races.
"If only I hadn't had that egg fu yung," he might think.
The bloke to worry about right now though is George Bridgewater.
Winning a bronze in the coxless pairs seemed to be a living hell for the big rower while most of us were quite happy to be happy for him.
As his partner Nathan Twaddle explained what had supposedly gone wrong in their final, Bridgewater looked like he couldn't wait to get hold of his medal to chuck it into the bottom of the drink. He was borderline angry, at the very least highly agitated.
Our expectations and George's were clearly different, whereas in the case of Drysdale the public and rower went into the Olympics on the same wavelength.
Hopefully, in years to come, Bridgewater will look at that medal with a touch more fondness.
In stark contrast, former world champion Beatrice Faumuina was as pleased as punch - supposedly - at flunking the discus. "Yahoo, I came 28th and my world is full of wonderful supporters," she beamed through a sadly contrived mask.
You suspect the selectors will decide that anyone who is so publicly happy at coming 28th should be left to revel in their own private world forever more.
Rowing commentator Peter Montgomery will also look back on the rowing and wonder what went wrong at the end of the gold medal row from Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell.
Having struggled, not altogether successfully, up the course, Montgomery lost the plot at the end, using the lane numbers as the finishing order guide and declaring Germany first, Britain second, and New Zealand third. This left his co-commentator, the perfectly adequate Mike Stanley, completely lost for words.
Give the man a break and let Montgomery do an overdub, because this footage of the turbo twins' second Olympic triumph will be played for years to come.
As a salve for an under-pressure TVNZ team, let's mention here Anthony Mosse has been - as always - excellent at the swimming, and the cycling commentators really know their stuff.
You wondered about the Springboks' mindset the moment fullback Percy Montgomery emerged from the tunnel and paraded his kids before the Cape Town crowd to mark his 100th test appearance. He even got to wear a special jersey. On his Cape Town form, it might have been wiser for Montgomery to have stayed perched on 99 games.
