Streeter Lecka / Getty

The Midlands didn’t get much of a look-in with the 2012 Olympics, despite the fact that Becky Adlington was born here and – perhaps even more significantly – the modern Games were essentially invented here. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the French aristocrat who founded the International Olympic Committee, admitted as much: ‘It was to [Thomas] Arnold that we turned, more or less consciously, for inspiration.’ Arnold was the headmaster of Rugby School – just down the road from Coventry – which in the nineteenth century pioneered the use of sport in education. Coubertin’s other big influence was the Wenlock Olympian Games in Shropshire – also in the Midlands, of course. It’s no coincidence that one of the 2012 Olympic mascots was called Wenlock.