LONDON — The Australians set the gold standard, if you will. When the Games of the 27th Olympiad arrived in Sydney 12 years ago, they were embraced with a fervor that bordered on fanaticism. The Aussies know a good party when they see one, and across 16 manic days and nights they threw an epic sporting shindig.
They were excellent hosts.
But they were even better homers. You would be walking along a beautiful stretch of Bondi Beach, maybe taking in the majesty of Sydney Harbor or simply drifting off to sleep after a long day downtown. And five minutes wouldn’t pass before the quiet was interrupted with the same chant, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day:
“OZZIE, OZZIE OZZIE! OI! OI! OI!”
When you heard that it meant: 1. Another Australian had won a gold medal; 2. An Australian had failed to win a gold medal; 3. An Australian face had been shown on television; or 4. There was oxygen in the air not to be wasted.
God, they had fun. And it was contagious: The Aussies won 16 gold medals in those Games, the second time they ever had reached double figures in that category.
The other? 1956, when the Games were in Melbourne. No coincidence.
As you tour London during these Games, you’ll see plenty of cynics and skeptics in your path. They’ll tell you how miserable traffic is. They’ll grumble about the tax burden, about the cost of tickets, how they wouldn’t attend an Olympic event with an engraved invitation from the Queen. They sound, quite frankly, like we would have sounded if we had lost the coin flip and the Olympics had invaded New York this summer.
But a funny thing has happened the past few days.
It started early Wednesday afternoon. I was inside a café near Trafalgar Square when joy detonated, instantly, everywhere. It seemed the whole nation was on its feet at once. It was startling, and for a second a bit worrisome, until scores of smiling faces, strangers all, began embracing and shouting and humming the Olympic theme that has invaded everyone’s eardrums in England.
“GOLD!” a woman named Charlotte Hansen screamed, and for a second it seemed she was laughing until, upon further review, it was clear she was weeping.
Hansen had seen what everyone else had seen, what everyone, seemingly, in the entirety of the United Kingdom had seen: Helen Glover and Heather Stanning had roared to victory in coxless pairs, a rowing event at Dorney Lake an hour outside of town.
It was Britain’s first gold of the Games. This is too good a sporting nation for any of the citizens to have worried about going 0-for-the-Games.
Still, that first one brought relief. And a sequel to V-J Day, too.
“A glorious day for Great Britain,” said Hansen, a computer programmer from Coventry in town on holiday. “Now we can get to enjoying these Games.”
And enjoy them they do. At every event, you don’t need a program to know when a Briton is approaching a starting gate, diving platform or service line: the crowd lets you know with their voices and their hands and their feet.
Yesterday morning, you needed a microscope to find anything in The Sun and the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror and the Evening Standard and the rest about Gabby Douglas, Michael Phelps or Carmelo Anthony.
That’s because Britain won three more golds Thursday — one of them, team cycling, in front of a canoodling William and Kate, which nearly made Fleet Street spontaneously combust.
Later, on the first day of the track and field competition, all 80,000 seats at Olympic Stadium were occupied — at least until the moment Jessica Ennis, a favorite to win the heptathlon, lined up for her 100-meter hurdles race. Then came a rumble and a sonic crush of sound, as Ennis won her heat in a personal-best time of 12.54 seconds.
Across town, if you looked into the cloudless sky and wondered where the thunder was coming from, that was your answer.
“Coming out in the stadium and seeing everyone and the crowd … it’s just such an amazing feeling,” Ennis marveled. “It gives you goose bumps.”
It seems there’s a bad case of those going around these days. Excellent hosts. Better homers. Well done. Or spot on, as the locals might say.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com