Mo Farah's gold medal in the men's 10,000m was a heartwarming tale, and, says Tanya Aldred in The Guardian, it is exactly the kind of story Britain needs to ensure an Olympic legacy.

Who says we can't do romance? How about a Mogadishu boy who came over to Britain in 1993 as a nine-year-old refugee with no English but a neat hand at getting into trouble, winning a gold medal in the 10,000 metres in the European Championships?

The Mo Farah story is a don't-put-it-down-till-you've-finished-it thriller. With his tiny frame that looks put together with Meccano, he might stroll down your road, past your window, unnoticed. But in British shorts and vest on Tuesday night in Barcelona he was simply brilliant, encouraging his friend Chris Thompson over his shoulder before switching off the partisan crowd, and making that glorious bid for the line with 300 yards to go.

Despair, hard work, aspiration and glory – if funding for prosaic old leisure centres across the country is going to disappear in the coalition slash and burn, we need these sorts of tales to inspire and to prop up the longed-for London Olympic legacy.

The individual stories are everything. I was 11 in 1984, old enough to be utterly obsessed but not old enough to be cynical. My brothers and I were glued to the telly during those two summer weeks of the Los Angeles Olympics, while ploughing our way through the packets of crisps which bore tokens that meant we could collect replica medals. We knew nothing of illegal doping, or sporting hypocrisy, or marketing, these people were just running and throwing and leaping and swimming like superhumans.

The British athletes were a rum old bunch. Daley Thompson, Fatima Whitbread, Tessa Sanderson, Seb Coe, Zola Budd, Steve Ovett – there was nothing smooth or PR savvy about any of them, even Coe back then. But they each span a wonderful tale.

Thompson, a one-man decathlon and moustache-production machine, was an explosion of mischief waiting to happen. In a range of specially made T-shirts in Los Angeles he suggested that Carl Lewis was gay, was rude about the American television coverage and at his press conference joked that he and Princess Anne were having an affair. His closest relationship at the time seemed to be with Jürgen Hingsen, the German who remained pale and stoical and unremitting in the face of repeated defeats by Thompson, who retained his Olympic title in 1984. Thompson also did mid-air somersaults on the high jump mat, whistled his way through the national anthem and staggered his way through the 1500 metres, easing up insouciantly at the end and so failing to beat the world record. We children loved him.

Then there was Whitbread, a javelin thrower whose unruly black hair had a life of its own. She had had a horrific childhood: abandoned in a north London flat as a baby, she was in and out of children's homes before being reunited with her violent mother, and was then finally adopted as a teenager. She was engaged not only in the Olympic final but also in a fierce rivalry with the more glamorous Sanderson – and while Whitbread won bronze, Sanderson became the first British black woman to win an Olympic gold. Well-versed in playground etiquette and warfare, we could see the distaste each woman felt for each other.

The golden boys, and fellow rivals, were Coe, Ovett and Steve Cram, the middle-distance gladiators who had the commentators drooling at the back. Hang the 100m, in 1984 middle-distance events reigned supreme. I was backing that nice blond Cram anyway, Coe and Ovett were a bit too weird, all gristly and pointy and blank-eyed and intense.

Throw in a shoeless Budd and the tumbling Mary Decker, an eastern European boycott, the bronze-winning British hockey team and Lewis matching Jesse Owens and reigning supreme above it all and you had Olympians and an Olympic Games to inspire, to be replayed at length outside in the garden and at school or over felled sofas in the living room.

There are two years to go to London. With the track to be laid next summer, the Olympic village sprouting with great vigour and the £257m Zaha Hadid swimming pool near completion, the infrastructure looks as if it will be ready in time. The tickets go on sale next spring, and the volunteering programme has been launched already.

All we need now is the athletes, and the stories. Chris Hoy, Rebecca Adlington and Jessica Ennis can go on to greater glories, others will appear through the mist, like Farah. Third in the medals table? A record haul of dangling metal? Yes, please. And enough stories to make those children fight to get to the playing fields.