HERE’s a name you won’t be hearing in the sports coverage from Paris: Nick Bandurak.

A brilliant striker, he has been an ever-present in the Great Britain and England hockey teams for the past two years, going back at least 40 matches; he found out five weeks ago that he had not been selected to be part of the squad for the Olympics. Neither will you be hearing about Jake Norris in the men’s hammer, or about Amelia Campbell, the shot putter: both are the best in Britain at their respective events, and both are good enough to meet the qualifying standard; but they have not been deemed medal contenders, and so have not been given entry.

And these names are just the tip of the iceberg. Harry Reardon’s brilliant book How to be an Olympian is a longitudinal study of two sportswomen, Hannah Dines and Jess Leyden, as they trained across an entire Olympic cycle, to make it to the Tokyo Games. The reader follows them from one early-morning training session to another, and from one thankless stay in a Travelodge after another, as part of the heroic treadmill of effort required to get to Olympic selection. After 200 pages of reading and four years of training, there comes the kicker: neither of them makes it.

Their stories represent literally hundreds of thousands of others. Even for the elite who have got there, the chances are poor. More than 10,000 sportsmen and -women are in Paris right now, but fewer than 1000 will go home with any kind of medal.

I love watching the Olympics as much as anybody, and I love to see British competitors winning; I love hearing the interviews, in which the athletes talk about all the sacrifices that they had made to get to the top, usually acknowledging their families, who will have sacrificed much to support their careers. It is only natural that we should share their delight in the shining circle of precious metal hanging from their neck.

But this focus on the victors is not entirely healthy: these are the winners in an ocean of defeat and broken dreams. Instead, let us celebrate more widely, look out for the person who came seventh, or the ones whose team finished bottom of the group. They have pushed their hearts and bodies to the limit, and, if they have come up short, then that’s probably more true to life than the glory of a gold medal. For, to paraphrase Irenaeus, God’s true glory is not there, but just in a human being fully alive. And sport, at all levels, provides plenty of that.

The Revd Robert Stanier is Vicar of St Andrew and St Mark, Surbiton, in the diocese of Southwark.