IN just over two years we will want Great Britain’s athletes, swimmers, cyclists, boxers, gymnasts and weight-lifters to put in stellar performances at our own Olympic Games.

Well, whoever the protagonists wearing the red, white and blue will be, they are more than half-way to podium paradise given the announcement from the British Olympic Association this week.

Amid full trumpet flounce and drum-roll dash it was revealed the Team GB kit will be designed by fashion designer Stella McCartney.

In conjunction with sports-wear titans Adidas. McCartney will be responsible for the whole kit and caboodle from competitive wear to Olympic village tracksuits through to official merchandise.

What next? An Olympic theme tune penned by la McCartney’s pop, former Beatle, Wings and all-round benighted Scouse thumbs-up good egg, Sir Paul McCartney.

Just think we could have new versions of Gold-bla-di gold-bla-da, Land On The Run and, specifically for sprinting titan Usain Bolt – Live And Let Fly or simply Jet.

But back to Macca’s offspring. The idea of getting a fashion designer in to produce the new look for the Olympics may not be as left-field as it seems.

Thrilled by the bold new departure for Team GB, Olympic and world gold medal-winning cyclist Victoria Pendleton explained how looking the part was integral to delivering the sporting goods. She even declared how some athletes have a saying along the lines of “look good, feel good – go for it”. And anything that makes Team GB “go for it” in 2012 has to heartily embraced.

BOA chief Andy Hunt was predictably thrilled at the teaming up of couture and endeavour, purring: “We are delighted Adidas have brought Stella on board.”

So far all things promotional for the 2012 games have not had the smoothest of rides.

The design of the official logo divided the nation when it was first outlined two years ago and just earlier this year the unveiling of the new Olympic mascots – the Cyclopian, yet modernistic Wenlock and Mandeville – drew outbursts of derision, despair and disdain.

So a yet more positive image for welcoming the world to Britain will be paramount. After all, these are our Games and with a fiscal clampdown putting on a squeeze tighter than a weight-lifter’s grip, the BOA will need all the uplift it can attract.

In years gone by when images of either Olympiads or Commonwealth Games flicked across tellies of big-box dimensions, it was always absorbing to watch various nations parade in their own special garb.

The USA were always flash and garish; the Brits under-stated and their slacks creased to within an inch of their raylon lives; the eastern bloc countries clad in virtual severely-starched uniforms.

Nowadays, as companies like Adidas, Nike and Puma have muscled in on all of the globe’s major sporting tournaments, leisure-wear is a lucrative, unit-shifting market, the value of which is measured in mega millions of pounds.

McCartney – Stella, not her Nehru-jacketed dad – at least has a worthy reputation on the catwalk and the high street to bring to the medal table.

Provided her designs do not border on the outlandish, nor inspire the ridicule rightly heaped on the cream-coloured Armani suits worn by Liverpool ahead of the 1996 FA Cup final that left them looking like so many disco lounge lizards, then Team GB could have the threads for medals.

* WHEN it comes to clothes-horses, there is no more high-profile example than David Beckham.

And he was smack back on the cusp of news this week with his inquest into what went wrong for England at the World Cup.

Revealing what we all knew to be true – England’s players were pants – Beckham’s homily carried little in the way of insight.

However, he did add he intended to keep on playing for England through to the 2012 Olympics, the 2014 World Cup and the same tournament four years later when it could conceivably come to England.

Contrast such a foolhardy sentiment with a member of England’s ill-fated 2010 squad announcing he was quitting international football.

Take a bow Emile Heskey for at least showing eminent sense in saying enough is enough when we know many more of your team-mates should also opt for exile, especially a certain DB.