Dreams of Gold

Rowan Jones, the up-and-coming Welsh poet, accidentally finds himself Poet Laureate of the London 2012 Olympic Games - a tenure that lasts maybe five minutes. In this brief time however he manages to send a message through the world's media announcing his support for an Olympics for individuals, not nations, according to the original principles of the Founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin. This message attracts a motley crew of disaffected athletes from all over the world to his eccentric farmhouse deep in the heart of Wales. There's Jeremiah the Tennessee backwoodsman, Marguerite the French existentialist, Yoshi and Toshi, the Japanese identical twins, Leonardo the Italian hunk, Solomon, the Hassidic weight-lifter, and Mad Mike and Jade and Kono and Ayesha and all the rest of them...And then there is the mad dictator, Osmanakhian who is scheming to disrupt the Games with a bizarre bomb plot. The athletes discover and - with the help of Perkins, a butler in the tradition of Jeeves - brilliantly thwart these plans, and earn their place in Olympic history.