With home medal success, record ticket sales and unprecedented media coverage, the 2012 Paralympics managed to achieve a shift in perceptions towards those with disabilities that extended well beyond merely sport.
When Western leaders are talking about the human rights issue in China and boycotting the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, China's response is always like "the Olympics are merely sport events.
It took the pith out of the twilight days of the Raj, making them seem rather jolly: the effete limeys were desperate not to be sent to the front line while the Indians – Char Wallah Muhammad, Punka Wallah Rumzan and a blacked-up Michael Bates as bearer Rangi Ram – merely obliging underlings sporting cheerful grins that, even when I was a boy, made me cringe.
Tiger Woods dominates sport -- not merely his sport, but sport in general -- as completely as anybody we have seen in a long, long time.
Andrews is merely the most visible representative of the sports medicine boom, which over the last two decades has changed not just sports but also medicine itself.
Sporting not merely a different hat but a different name (John Wesley Harding, Wesley Stacee has an international reputation as a sometime-folk, sometime-rock singer.
But with record-setting TV audiences in Anand's home country of India, and huge interest around the world, Carlsen's achievement is not merely a sporting one.
Referring to a British track-and-field star, Ms. Hyde wrote that according to the government's thinking, "Jessica Ennis winning gold is no longer merely a sporting aspiration but something that would cause a massive and immediate recalibration of the balance of payments".
With the possible exception of hosts Ghana, no team at the tournament will be more driven than the Ivorians, who are intent on lifting the trophy not merely for sporting reasons but also to help heal their homeland, which for the last decade has been riven by ethnic strife.
Indeed, if I understand correctly the way the Games are now being talked about – and it's all the most frightful cobblers, so forgive any misapprehensions – Jessica Ennis winning gold is no longer merely a sporting aspiration but something that would cause a massive and immediate recalibration in the balance of payments.
