A year is not long when you are trying to rehabilitate yourself in the eyes of the world.

On this Sunday, exactly a year ago, the world’s media looked on at the burning streets of London. ‘Anarchy’ was the favourite headline. Many of them projected forward a year: ‘Who will be watching The Olympics? Who will go? Who will risk their golden athletes in a lawless city?’ asked one portentous publication from a country with an interesting record on urban rioting and civil chaos.

            I came of an England, and indeed fled, a narrow stratum that seemed stuck in mourning a past of self-selecting elitism—an entrenched law that was running out of ideas, bar using the old school tie system to hang those that dared to try and storm its portals. But that law of a few is still in place, because it is how the human condition functions. It is the same law that allows individuals to become Olympians. We are just stumbling around as we find new ways to use it that do not get mired and disabled by political correctitude.

             Fifty per cent of the medals won by our Olympic squad in Beijing in 2008 were won by those who had been privately educated, though only seven per cent of the population go to private schools. This is not quite the wealth class stunt that most think it to be, but more a case of daily sport in private schools versus almost no sport in the state system— a tricky Thatcher legacy that implemented the selling off of state school playing fields.

            The majority of those convicted as a result of the 2011 August riots in London were from inner city areas of London, known more their ghetto policing and gang crime statistics than for the achievement of their hard-grafting, and underfunded sports clubs. A few days ago, a young man, convicted during the riots, spoke about his experience in a boot camp-style programme that acted as his conduit from prison back onto Civvy Street. All those on the programme were being made to do a lot of endurance sport. ‘Before this whole thing I used to head out to roam and start up stuff around 1 or 2am. Now I like to go to bed at about 10pm. I’m so tired from the exercise. I feel so good I don’t need to think about causing s***,’ he said.

            It is from the same cultural mix, held up as being the melting pot that forged the rioters, that Olympians have been fashioned.

On that Sunday in August 2011 mobile networks, Twitter, and Blackberry messenger were the tools used to rally looters and rioters. Photojournalists captured night images of crime being recorded by all those involved, the night lit up by burning buildings and mobile camera flashes. Last night the Olympic Stadium was illuminated by the flames of Thomas Heatherwick’s exquisite cauldron as tens of thousands of mobile cameras flashed, recording British Olympic history being made. Grown men and women broke down in tears all across the country as a slight man, born into a war in Somalia, crossed the finishing line and fell to his knees, touching his head to the ground in prayer; when a woman whose mother comes from Derbyshire and her father from Jamaica, dug so deep into her reserves in order to win the final discipline of the heptathlon for the crowd, even though she almost could have walked that final run rather than push herself beyond human limits to cross the line first.

This is a confused and confusing island, unsure of how to place itself in the world now. We create parameters of language that actually patronise those they are supposed to address, stumbling as we try and work out how to move beyond what shames us in our past. But in one year the streets of London have been re-invented, not only as an Olympic showpiece, but in human terms. It is this ability to absorb, to adapt, and to change, that allows this strange island to nurture seemingly small, wiry human miracles, enabling them to become giants.

And so we stand and cheer, we sing, we raise our hands to salute these people who are showing us what can be done on this funny wet island of ours.