大象传媒

If being red-hot favourite for an Olympic gold medal is a tough burden to carry, Phillips Idowu is .

Lounging around at the Metropolitan Hotel on London's Old Park Lane, brown beanie hat pulled low over his dark red dyed hair, gold hoops through his right ear and left eyebrow and studs though his nose and lower lip, he looks as relaxed as a snoozing leopard.

"I'm a cool person by nature," he says, "I'll go out to Beijing and do what I've been doing all year - perform well, remain undefeated and hopefully bring back gold. It's just another sandpit in another country."

Everything in British modern pentathlon seems to be four years ahead of schedule.

Not only has Team GB into this year's Olympics - something planned for London, not Beijing - but before 2008's event has even started, 大象传媒 Sport's team find ourselves yards from in Greenwich.

Pentathlon's powers-that-be chose Greenwich as the backdrop for the team's final media appearance before they head off to China. It's a wise decision, not least because , where the press gathering takes place, is a magisterial, imposing setting. Somehow that suits modern pentathlon, on first glance one of the less fathomable Olympic sports.

Every time I write about pentathlon I feel compelled to trawl out the list of all five sports involved - well, I'm bored with that (and pentathlon fans, though few in number, must despair when reporters insist on spelling out the basics for the umpteenth time, like having every football report start with "the match lasted approximately 90 minutes, with 11 men on each team").

If you're not sure then you can find out but, honestly, you don't even need to know. The only pentathlon knowledge you need, before you sit down to watch it on 21 and 22 August, is that Great Britain's competitors are really good and ought to win a medal in the women's event. Then you can pick up the sports as you go along.

A lot has happened since my last post!

First of all, the GB team has been named, and it's a great line-up as well with Helen Tucker and Hollie Avil, Tim Don, Alistair Brownlee and me.

I'm really happy with the team, it's really well-rounded with no "weakest link" and I genuinely believe that each one of us could win a medal.

Alan Campbell's nickname may be "Monkey" but that has more to do with his physique than a reference to the missing link he provides to what I reckon is the most exciting period in rowing's history.

It is not all about public schools and Oxbridge colleges, although they dominated the sport for the second half of the last century and their influence is still very strong.

Campbell will compete for Britain in the single scull, an event that can trace its popularity further back than football, standing alongside boxing in the 19th Century at the heart of popular sport.

History dictates that the biggest events we should remember from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico are Bob Beamon's long jump record and the but the achievements of a 16-year-old from America in the swimming pool should not be forgotten either.