The Guardian’s Olympics editor, Owen Gibson, swallows his cynicism and plays his part in Eltham

The last time I saw the Olympic flame, it was heading for Wales more than 60 days ago. I had travelled to Cornwall to see Goldenballs [David Beckham] land in his golden plane carrying the golden torch, feeling more than a little cynical about the heavy sponsorship cloaking the relay and with memories of the security-heavy pre-Beijing jaunt in mind.

I left three days later a convert and convinced London 2012 organisers had pulled off a masterstroke in embedding the relay in each community it passed through, meaning that a glowing core of local pride outweighed any residual discomfort at the multinational wrapper it came in.

It’s hard to stay cynical when hundreds of children – inspired or brainwashed, depending on your view – bearing paper replicas are lining the streets and mobbing the torch. Since then, an estimated 10 million people have seen the relay and it has had a similar effect in all four corners of the UK (and Dublin). Now it’s my turn.

Given the meticulous planning of the relay, which has passed within 95% of the population, it was something of a surprise to only find out where exactly my leg would be three days before I was running – and to be told I should pick up my dazzling white uniform on the day. Perhaps the relay is succeeding despite the same “just in time” ethos that has cost G4S so dearly.

The torch begins its first day in London passing through one of the Olympic venues that has proved most controversial. By siting equestrian events in Greenwich Park, Locog was able to deliver on its promises of a “compact” Games in landmark locations. But it also provoked the ire of local residents and some competitors, leading to claims that £42m is being spent on a photo opportunity with no legacy.

As one of a number of journalists offered places on the torch relay by the organisers or sponsors – Lloyds, in my case – I paused briefly before accepting in the knowledge that it’s not an opportunity likely to come around again on my own doorstep. Yes, I’ve bought in to the “once in a lifetime” schtick, too.

I’ll start close to where I take my son to football on a Saturday morning, and pass within a long hoof from the fields where I used to play Sunday league in my younger, fitter days. Both bring to mind the huge task that Seb Coe and his colleagues face in delivering on the promises they made to secure the Games, of inspiring the young and getting the rest of us off our sofas.

As is typical in London, in the now royal borough of Greenwich grinding poverty in some areas rubs up against seven-figure homes of bankers who commute to Canary Wharf. Likewise, expansive and lush private school playing fields sit cheek by jowl beside sometimes dilapidated public facilities, some of which have admittedly received makeovers from 2012-related schemes.

One of those independent schools, Eltham College, has a famous Olympic link in that one of its alumni is Eric Liddell of Chariots of Fire fame – and its pristine pitches will play host to Ryan Giggs and the rest of the British football team before they play at Wembley.

I like to think I’ll be able to ruminate on all of that as I glide as effortlessly as Liddell up to Eltham High Street. In reality I’ll be puffing hard and too busy concentrating on not dropping the torch before passing on the flame to the next, much more worthy, bearer outside – yes – McDonald’s.

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A teenager tried to grab the Olympic torch as the relay passed through Gravesend in Kent

After months of apparent indifference, large crowds line the streets as the torch moves northwards on day 21 of the relay

When Kirsty Kane carried the Olympic torch the last few metres to the doorway of the Robert Burns museum, she had her own band of cheerleaders who ignored the carefully choreographed ceremonial schedule.

Despite the unseasonal chill and occasional spits of rain, the raucous group of teenage girls wore hand-lettered white T-shirts and vests, and chanted “Go, Kirsty, go”, punching the air, as their friend went to “kiss” the flame of her torch with that held by the next torch-bearer, Suzanne Otterson, a figure skater who had competed at the 1992 Winter Olympics.

Drowning out the schoolchildren’s xylophone band playing by the museum entrance, “Team Kirsty” were there to watch Kane, 17, from Saltcoats, hit a significant personal best. She has cerebral palsy; until several years ago, she was wheelchair bound. She still finds it difficult keeping her balance.

Her foster dad John McMenemy said Kane had a determined attitude: she swims, does Zumba and karate and had joined the Girls’ Brigade. She was thrilled to carry the torch, he said. “Never in her wildest dreams had she thought she would get chosen to do this,” added her foster mum Susan McMenemy.

One of 128 torchbearers on day one in Scotland, Kirsty had been cheered by several hundred locals and parties of schoolchildren gathered in Alloway, Burns’ birthplace, to watch the torch head northwards, many waving union flags, incongruous inflated batons branded by the Olympics phone sponsor Samsung, and small Olympic pennants.

It was another such moment that summed up the community spirit that defined the day: after months of apparent indifference in a country that often feels a great political and social distance from the host city, London, the Olympics had arrived.

Soon afterwards in Ayr, the size of the crowds forced the relay organisers to allow more time in the town. In Kilmarnock, as bells rang out, the crowds were four or five people deep, cheering for the first among the 700 torchbearers who will take it through Scotland: a blinded ex-army captain, James Cuthbertson, who now runs ultramarathons; a kidney transplant patient who competes for the GB transplant team, Kenneth McLure; Andrew MacIntyre, born with Down’s syndrome and now a champion gymnast with 50 medals; and Lisa Heenan, the Duke of Edinburgh’s award ambassador for Scotland.

The torch will now be carried, driven and flown to all corners of Scotland and its islands: after a large open air concert in Glasgow on Friday evening, when the Glaswegian film actor James McAvoy does his part for Scotland’s celebrities by carrying the torch, it will travel on a mountain gondola at Aonach Mor ski resort near Fort William, to the neolithic standing stones at Callanish in the Western Isles, to Orkney, Shetland and then south via Inverness, Aberdeen, Dundee and then Edinburgh.

The relay had started in the port town of Stranraer just after 6am. Several thousand people, including schoolchildren roused from bed at 4.45am who waved homemade cardboard torches with tissue paper flames, had woken soon after dawn to see the torch begin its seven-day tour of Scotland.

After landing from Northern Ireland at Cairnryan ferry port on Thursday evening, amid driving rain and gusting winds, it was carried past the three- or four-deep crowds in central Stranraer by Ross McClelland, 20, from Ayr, a soldier with the Royal Regiment of Scotland and Afghanistan veteran.

Tall, tanned and nervous, McClelland admitted to having butterflies and was surprised at the early morning crowds: “It was amazing. There were a lot more people than I was expecting.”

Along that first leg in Dumfries and Galloway, houses, gateposts, shops and post offices were garlanded with union jack pennants and large union flags; a relatively rare sight in Scotland, they outnumbered the scattering of saltires and Scottish lions rampant, but the south-west of Scotland puts Conservatives in power more readily than other parts of the country.

David Mundell, Scotland’s only Tory MP and the Scotland Office junior minister, was in Stranraer for the send-off. Swatting off early morning midges, Mundell said: “It’s a massive turnout; there’s a real buzz. One of the organisers was saying it’s one of the biggest turnouts they’ve had for a 6am start.”

Ministers in both the Scottish and UK government’s hope the torch relay will finally ignite popular interest in the games. Ticket sales for the eight Olympic football matches at Hampden, Scotland’s national football arena, where the torch arrived late on Friday afternoon, have been extremely slow.

This has caused anxieties for ministers and organisers. With 50 days before the games start, the Herald newspaper disclosed on Thursday that only 3,000 tickets had been sold for some matches: only 20,000 seats had sold for the 52,000-seater stadium for the highest profile match between Spain and Japan.

After demanding a separate Scottish Olympics team five years ago and repeated disputes over receiving a share of the billions spent on the Games, the Scottish National party government in Edinburgh has now swung fully behind the event. In the latest row which threatened a diplomatic rift, the Olympics organising committee, Locog, authorised Hampden to continue flying the saltire as normal during the Games events.

Shona Robinson, the Scottish sports minister, said this was a commonsense decision. She hopes to see up to 60 Scottish members of Team GB win medals in London, and build up a stronger sense of popular excitement about sports before Glasgow hosts the Commonwealth games in 2014.

“We’re absolutely behind the athletes and of course we aspire to have our own Olympics team, post-independence, but currently Scots are part of Team GB and we will get behind the team, and looking forward to seeing a lot of Scots medal,” she said, in an interview with the Guardian.

“I make no bones about supporting our athletes, and the current constitutional arrangement is that they’re part of Team GB and we wish them all the best; we wish Team GB all the best.”

The author is relieved a Youth Eisteddfod still brings out more bunting than the Olympics or Mrs Windsor’s 60-year reign

The Olympic Torch visits the World Heritage town of Caernarfon on Monday. On its way to Bangor, it passes my window, skirting the Menai Straits and only a few yards from the sea. The streets look pretty festive, with pennants hanging from lamp-posts and decorating houses and shop fronts. Caernarfon is in a welcoming mode.

The torch will be in Y Maes, the town square, overlooked by Caernarfon’s imposing castle, built by Edward I to emphasise his dominance of Wales after a hard-won campaign. It was he who invented the title “Prince of Wales”, which is why the castle was chosen for the invented tradition of Prince Charles’s investiture in 1969. For this occasion, bunting-flecked royalists were bussed into town, while potential local troublemakers received an admonitory visit from the police.

As well as home to some royal kitsch, Caernarfon castle hosts a moving permanent exhibition of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (it retains the archaic spelling of Welsh), whose soldiers included the poets Robert Graves and David Jones, and the bard Hedd Wyn, who won the Eisteddfod chair in 1917. Wyn had died three weeks earlier at Passchendaele, so the chair remained empty and was draped in black.

Caernarfon is taking the current forcefeeding of British national boosterism, sycophancy and cliche with more equanimity today than it did in 1969 or even 1977: those flags and pennants I mentioned are not red, white and blue but red, green and white. And it’s not the Olympic torch or the jubilee that the town is welcoming, but the Urdd Eisteddfod, the Youth Eisteddfod.

For those of us ambivalent about or downright suspicious of organised fun – centralised and nationalised fun – Caernarfon is a good place to avoid the triple whammy of sport, royalty and manufactured Britishness that comes from every direction: from the BBC to the local Morrisons, where there are enough unsold “Jubilee party packs” to build the town a new sea wall. There’s a lot to be ambivalent about: last week a Cornish flag was torn from the hands of one of the torch-bearers, there are the usual debates about the legitimacy of “Team GB”, and here in Wales we’re also wondering how much of the money diverted from Wales for the Olympics will ever find its way back to one of the poorest regions in the UK.

The historian Gwyn Alf Williams told us years ago that Wales was in danger of becoming, down south, a Costa Bureaucratica and, here in the north, a Costa Geriatrica. If anything could have made him revise his opinion, it would have been places like Caernarfon, where a Youth Eisteddfod still brings out more flags than the Olympics, Euro 2012 or Mrs Windsor’s 60 years on the throne.

As for the castle: Edward I may have built it, and Prince Charles might have been invested there, but, in the words of the Caernarfon poet and musician Geraint Lovgreen, “Ni bua’r dre erbyn hyn” – “The town belongs to us now.”

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Torchbearers carry the Olympic flame from Swansea to Aberystwyth

Lynn ‘The Leap’ Davies on schoolboy grit in Nant-y-Moel that led to long jump gold at the Tokyo 1964 Games

Nant-y-Moel is a most unlikely place to produce an Olympic champion, I suppose. Back in the 1950s it was a typical mining village, a very small and warm community. There were no particular sporting facilities, just a rugby pitch and a football pitch. Most of my childhood was spent outdoors with my mates, roaming the Bwlch mountain.

There were two mines within a mile of my home. My father left for work at 5.30 every morning, walked the mile to the Wyndham, then go underground, and walk the best part of it back again. He would end up working underneath the house he had left an hour earlier.

I think it was the ambition of most of the mothers in the village to make sure their sons didn’t end up following in their fathers’ footsteps. There was a big emphasis on making sure you passed the 11-plus exam.

I loved rugby and football, although they wouldn’t let a football anywhere near the grounds of Ogmore grammar school. We only did athletics on one day of the year, on sports day. We’d wander up to The Planker, the local playing field, where there was a very rough and ready long-jump pit, which the council used to fill with two tons of sand each May.

I jumped about 21ft on very raw natural ability, so my sports teacher, Royden Thomas, said: “We’ll have to enter you in the Glamorgan schools athletic championship.”

That was at Maindy stadium in Cardiff. It was a very big step up for me and on the day I was competing, Ron Pickering was there. He had just been appointed the national athletics coach for Wales, and he told me I could be a very good athlete if I started training properly.

If I hadn’t met Ron that day, I doubt very much I would have become an athlete at all. He was such an inspiring figure, he convinced me it was the right way to go, even if it meant giving up playing rugby and football.

I was chosen to run the 100 yards, the 100-yard relay and the long jump in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. I went there thrilled to be selected but with no real expectation. My aim in the long jump was to get to the final and maybe get on to the podium if things went my way.

On the day the weather was atrocious – wind, rain, very cold, not at all conducive to events like the long jump. Who knows, perhaps my upbringing in Nant-y-Moel and the wilds of the Bwlch mountain helped me through to win the gold medal?

The family home was in Commercial Street, where my mother had a draper’s shop. When I got back after Tokyo, the council had painted two red lines 26ft 5in apart on the pavement outside my house. It was quite funny watching people from the window trying to beat the jump.

I don’t know if the lines are still there. I no longer have any family ties in Nant-y-Moel, and I’ll have already run my leg of the torch relay in Cardiff by the time it reaches the village.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the land was scarred by decades of mining. But these days, looking through what we call the keyhole at the top of the Bwlch, it is a beautiful sight.

Day seven saw the Olympic torch carried through Wales and western England

The spray-on kitsch is fairly hard to take, but even harder to take is that the organisers actually take it seriously

✒It’s the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday, the 57th. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it was the last? At least for us. BBC1 could put on reruns of Flog It!, or pro-celebrity badminton. The song contest would disappear on to one of those cable channels with audiences so small they can’t be measured – Eurosport 3, perhaps.

Because it is so utterly, horribly grim. Acts which would not get a gig on Ladies’ Night at the Baku Freemasons appear in front of millions singing like a cement mixer tackling Celine Dion’s greatest hits, or, because they are always decades behind, doing punk in Finnish, or there’s some preening poltroon in sky-blue vinyl who resembles a rapper as much as I sound like Jose Feliciano.

It was bearable when Terry Wogan sent the whole thing up (Graham Norton isn’t bad, but there’s no avoiding the fact that he quite likes the spray-on kitsch) but – and here’s how it compares to the EU – the organisers got angry with Wogan because, and you may find it hard to believe, they take it seriously! They imagine that it really is a feast of fine music, brought together to bring nations together in harmony, when in fact it’s a steaming bowl full of ordure!

When we pull out, the other nations – (is Azerbaijan, this year’s host, technically a nation? Or was it invented by Sacha Baron Cohen, to satirise torture, political oppression, etc?) will claim sour grapes, since the UK hasn’t won since the 1997 landslide that came two days after Tony Blair’s landslide, and because in 2010 we came last. But Britain is the second biggest producer of genuinely popular music around the world! We don’t need Eurovision! This is like Chelsea playing park football. In gold lamé jumpsuits.

✒Incidentally I went to see Baron Cohen’s The Dictator last weekend. I thought it was very funny, my wife less so. I noticed that the reviews divided along “gender” (ie sexual) lines. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave it five stars, the Sunday Telegraph’s female reviewer gave it one. Guys, go and see this hilarious film! And leave your womenfolk behind!

✒Brung! The phone rings, and this time it is me, calling Barry Cryer to ask for his latest jokes. He has one furnished by Jim Naughtie. A vet and a taxidermist go into business together. Their slogan: “Either way, you get your dog back.”

A chap warns his parrot that if he goes on swearing, he’ll be punished. So after another four-letter word, he puts the bird in the fridge for twenty minutes. When he takes it out, the parrot says, “Blimey, that was bad. But what the hell did that chicken do?”

“I love this hot weather! I went to the beach yesterday. It was so crowded that if the woman in front of me hadn’t had her ears pierced, I wouldn’t have seen the sea at all.”

Barry is slightly hard of hearing so he watches the news with the instantaneous subtitles. This week he read about the “Queen’s jubilee jeer” and at the Olympic torch ceremony in Greece, “the handing over of the blame.”

✒There’s a nasty flavour coming into the Olympics. All those small shopkeepers told they can’t make a display from the Olympic rings. The woman in Norfolk who knitted a pullover for a doll in a charity sale with the rings and “GB 2012″ on it, and was told it was in breach of copyright. Yes, I know that McDonalds and Coca-Cola and other purveyors of health-giving nutrients have forked out billions in sponsorship. But the biggest sponsors of all, by a huge margin, have been the taxpayers of Great Britain, who seem to be shut out of everything as completely as we are from the special car lanes for Olympic bureaucrats.

✒Oh, we do have a role to play. If you live in the East End of London you might have a rocket launch site on your roof, so that if a suspicious plane comes in it can be shot down and kill you and your neighbours rather than anyone in the Olympic park. And London Underground is certainly doing its bit. This week I missed by minutes a great Jubilee line snarl-up which kept 700 near-hysterical passengers stewing in a tunnel during a heatwave because the idiots who run the system can’t keep their trains properly serviced. The Jubilee, the one line that the entire Games depend on!

✒ My friend Bob Lindo, former RAF pilot, now world-renowned winemaker, staged an angry protest of his own the other day. Bob makes Camel Valley, which along with some other wines has made British sparkling wine among the very best in the world – some say close to being the best. He was at the duty-free in Gatwick when he saw a display of sparkling wine labelled “Best of British”. It was for Lanson champagne, which is of course made in France. The bottles were wrapped in Union Flag jackets. He was furious, and refused to leave the store until they took down the display, following up with a letter to Theresa May. As he points out, in a recent blind tasting Lanson came 87th, behind no fewer than 83 British sparklers. I wonder how the French would feel if Bob sold his Cornish wine at Charles de Gaulle under a label, “Gloire de France”.

✒Your letters; many thanks. Apparently there are loads of memorials to former prime minister Spencer Perceval, including a street in north London, but of course still none in parliament. And I was quite wrong about James Bond not drinking lager. Joshua Topp has gone through the entire written canon and found that in Goldfinger, he drinks a bottle of Löwenbräu while in Alsace, and in The Man With The Golden Gun, a gorgeous barmaid sells him a Red Stripe for 1/6 – 7½ pence. No mention of Heineken, though.

✒And a huge harvest of labels and signs. Margaret Crisell and John Post spotted this warning sign outside the Ladies at Bristol airport: “During a terminal evacuation, red lights will flash … ” More next week.

Jamie Wilson on the Malvern hills route, where he cycles to his own finishing line

At some point on Friday morning the Olympic torch is due to cross the finishing line of my own personal race. It’s only a short climb from the church in Welland to the sign at the top of the Malvern hills that marks the spot where Worcestershire turns into Herefordshire, but on a bike it’s more than three miles of leg-searing and lung-busting pain.

I have cycled this stretch of road in all seasons and all weathers, and the only constant is that it is always seems to feels harder than the last time. My personal best from the pub in the village of Welland to the top is 13 minutes.

I chalk off the landmarks as I go: first the footpath to Castlemorton Common, ahead the beautiful Norman priory of Little Malvern where the road kicks up to its steepest with a vicious gradient of more than 14%.

Then the left turn on to the main road with the sign to Sir Edward Elgar’s grave, from where three more steep bends bring you to the wooden shuttered cafe, offering a cup of tea and slice of flapjack to hungry walkers. And, finally, I reach my imaginary finishing tape.

If the torch was stopped for a moment and its carrier turned right, it would come to a spring cascading into an old stone basin, where there is always a car or two with an open boot waiting to receive the plastic flagons their owners are filling with Malvern water.

If the carrier turned left, the path would lead to the top of British Camp, a medieval hilltop encampment whose residents sculpted defensive ramparts out of the soil but which now draws picnickers and the occasional sheep.

From the summit, as local folklore has it, it’s possible to spy 13 counties, and if you stretch a piece of string in a straight line east the next highest point it would touch would be the Urals. I have no idea if this is true, but I like to think it is.

I also don’t know what Elgar’s inspiration was for his cello concerto, but for me it always sings of this view: to the north the eight-mile spine of the hills traces a line towards the dark shadow of Worcester and then Birmingham beyond; the Vale of Evesham and the Cotswolds to the east; Gloucestershire to the south and, to the west, the green rolling fields and cider orchards of Herefordshire.

When I think of England it is this vista I see in my mind, and it is always worth the effort of getting here.

 Jamie Wilson is the Guardian’s Olympics news editor: @wilsonjamie

As the relay enters Wales, Eddie Butler recalls the Olympic triumph of a champion whose grave lies high above two very different towns

The Olympic torch is entering Wales. On its way from Worcester to Cardiff it will be taken across the rolling countryside of Monmouthshire before its journey into the old industrial highland around Brynmawr and Blaenavon. The turning point of the torch relay, from the gently bucolic to the industrially bruised, is the market town of Abergavenny and, above it, the 561-metre (1,841ft) Blorenge mountain.

The contrast in the five miles that separate Abergavenny, picture-postcard pretty and home of the largest food festival in the UK, and Blaenavon, 91 metres down in a bowl on the other side of the Blorenge’s summit, could not be starker.

Blaenavon was a cradle of industrial revolution, once rich in the ore, coal and limestone that made it an iron town of 20,000 inhabitants. It is now less than a third of that size, but is a world heritage site and home of the Big Pit national coal museum.

High on the moorland between the two towns is an outcrop of grey rocks, and set in the middle there is a green metal plaque marking the burial site of Foxhunter, the horse ridden by Sir Harry Llewellyn at the Helsinki Olympic Games of 1952.

On 2 August that year, the day before the end of a Games during which Britain had not won a single gold medal, the pair went clear in the second round of the team showjumping, and the country had a winner at last.

Wilf White, on Nizefela, and Duggie Stewart, on Aherlow, obviously played their part, but it was Foxhunter and Llewellyn who seemed to capture the public’s imagination. Here was a tale of recovery, of converting 16.75 first-round faults into a clear in the second.

Llewellyn had had success as an amateur jockey before the war, finishing second on Ego in the 1936 Grand National. But after the war – he ended it as liaison officer to Montgomery – he concentrated on showjumping. He bought Foxhunter as a six-year-old in 1946, and they won a team bronze at the London Games of 1948, and then the gold in Helsinki.

Foxhunter’s burial site between Blaenavon and Abergavenny is carefully placed. Llewellyn was born into a coal family, on the owners’ side. His father, the chairman of Welsh Associated Collieries, took the baronetcy of Bwllfa, Aberdare in 1922.

Llewellyn had the money to live elsewhere, down off the mountain in a beautiful home, Llanfair Grange, near Abergavenny. After nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947, he turned to other businesses, with interests in brewing and television. After 1952 he set up a chain of cafes called Foxhunter.

The horse retired in 1955 and died in 1959. Llewellyn died in 1999 and his ashes were scattered around the horse’s memorial. That is, between a coal town and the edge of the cliff that will look down on the Olympic torch, 60 years after Llewellyn and Foxhunter helped win Britain’s one and only Olympic gold medal in the 1952 Games.

Eddie Butler is the Observer’s rugby correspondent