LONDON — More often than not, the Olympic host city doesn’t really host the Olympics. It merely hosts a couple of IOC caviar buffets, while the real event tends to take place in a remote pasture or distant slum. That’s not so of the London Games, an exercise in bravado that is really here, in the heart of this great, ageless swirl of a city, with all the potential chaos, headache and magnificence that might entail. Mitt Romney better look both ways when he leaves his hotel, or he is liable to be hit by a ball.

How romantic, to actually hold the Games outside the front door of Buckingham Palace, just over the back wall of 10 Downing Street, under the caustic eye of the Fleet Street press and in full view of a judgmental mob that evidently includes a certain U.S. presidential candidate. To Romney’s eye gazing from his suite, London is not quite prepared, an opinion he rendered based on his credentials as the organizer of the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics. To which Prime Minister David Cameron replied, “Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic games in the middle of nowhere.”

Cameron’s hold-the-vermouth tone reminded us that if the English historically possess a predominant national characteristic, it’s wit. Salt Lake has a population of 190,000, versus London’s 7.5 million. Moreover, the Salt Lake Olympics weren’t actually in Salt Lake. They were in a small gated condo in Deer Valley, unless they were in Kimball Junction.

These Games will be so threaded through the streets of London that oddsmaker William Hill took money bets on whether the torch procession would accidently catch the exuberant mayor’s hair on fire. Boris Johnson has a famously rampant blond mane, not to mention rampantly hilarious mouth. He once said: “My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”

Johnson insists that it’s only right the Olympics be in London because, “Virtually every single one of our international sports were either invented or codified by the British . . . and there I think you have the essential difference between us and the rest of the world.” Including, he insists, table tennis. The French looked at a table and “saw dinner,” he said. Whereas the British saw opportunity.

The odds on Johnson’s hair catching fire from the torch started out at 60-1. But then Johnson got a trim, and they rose to 100-1. “I didn’t know he had gone and got a sneaky haircut,” William Hill spokesman Rupert Adams told Reuters indignantly. “It’s not so wavy now so it’s less likely to catch fire.”

Still, there was a chance. The torch was so promiscuously paraded that it seemed to touch every monument and dignitary in the city: It ducked into Buckingham Palace, as well as Shakespeare’s Globe. It also rode on a double-decker bus.

Here, open-water swimmers will thrash in the dark eddy of Serpentine lake smack in the middle of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, led by Britain’s medal favorite Keri-Anne Payne, who was the subject of a tabloid headline this week that read, “At Last I Won’t Be Swimming With Sharks, Old Shopping Trollies and Dead Dogs.” Which was pretty good but didn’t come close to matching the all-time winner that ran in The Sunday Sport a few years ago: “Aliens Turned My Son Into a Fish Finger.”