The author is relieved a Youth Eisteddfod still brings out more bunting than the Olympics or Mrs Windsor’s 60-year reign

The Olympic Torch visits the World Heritage town of Caernarfon on Monday. On its way to Bangor, it passes my window, skirting the Menai Straits and only a few yards from the sea. The streets look pretty festive, with pennants hanging from lamp-posts and decorating houses and shop fronts. Caernarfon is in a welcoming mode.

The torch will be in Y Maes, the town square, overlooked by Caernarfon’s imposing castle, built by Edward I to emphasise his dominance of Wales after a hard-won campaign. It was he who invented the title “Prince of Wales”, which is why the castle was chosen for the invented tradition of Prince Charles’s investiture in 1969. For this occasion, bunting-flecked royalists were bussed into town, while potential local troublemakers received an admonitory visit from the police.

As well as home to some royal kitsch, Caernarfon castle hosts a moving permanent exhibition of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (it retains the archaic spelling of Welsh), whose soldiers included the poets Robert Graves and David Jones, and the bard Hedd Wyn, who won the Eisteddfod chair in 1917. Wyn had died three weeks earlier at Passchendaele, so the chair remained empty and was draped in black.

Caernarfon is taking the current forcefeeding of British national boosterism, sycophancy and cliche with more equanimity today than it did in 1969 or even 1977: those flags and pennants I mentioned are not red, white and blue but red, green and white. And it’s not the Olympic torch or the jubilee that the town is welcoming, but the Urdd Eisteddfod, the Youth Eisteddfod.

For those of us ambivalent about or downright suspicious of organised fun – centralised and nationalised fun – Caernarfon is a good place to avoid the triple whammy of sport, royalty and manufactured Britishness that comes from every direction: from the BBC to the local Morrisons, where there are enough unsold “Jubilee party packs” to build the town a new sea wall. There’s a lot to be ambivalent about: last week a Cornish flag was torn from the hands of one of the torch-bearers, there are the usual debates about the legitimacy of “Team GB”, and here in Wales we’re also wondering how much of the money diverted from Wales for the Olympics will ever find its way back to one of the poorest regions in the UK.

The historian Gwyn Alf Williams told us years ago that Wales was in danger of becoming, down south, a Costa Bureaucratica and, here in the north, a Costa Geriatrica. If anything could have made him revise his opinion, it would have been places like Caernarfon, where a Youth Eisteddfod still brings out more flags than the Olympics, Euro 2012 or Mrs Windsor’s 60 years on the throne.

As for the castle: Edward I may have built it, and Prince Charles might have been invested there, but, in the words of the Caernarfon poet and musician Geraint Lovgreen, “Ni bua’r dre erbyn hyn” – “The town belongs to us now.”

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Torchbearers carry the Olympic flame from Swansea to Aberystwyth

Mexico 2-0 Wales

Two goals from Aldo De Nigris handed Chris Coleman a second successive defeat as the Wales manager as his side were well beaten by Mexico in New York on Sunday.

Wales were always likely to be up against it without Gareth Bale and Joe Ledley, and they struggled with the humidity and a lifeless pitch at the MetLife Stadium, failing to force a save from Jesus Corona.

The Monterrey striker De Nigris scored the opener in the 43rd minute as he headed home from inside the six-yard box and added a second with a chested finish a minute before the final whistle.

It could have been worse for Wales as Jason Brown made a series of fine saves to deny the excellent Giovani Dos Santos, Edgar Andrade and Severo Meza.

But to Wales’s credit they refused to buckle under the almost constant barrage of Mexican pressure with Brown, Joe Allen and Ashley Williams impressing in adversity.

In the opening stages the Mexico midfielder Andrade spurned a great opportunity when he was played in by Jesus Navala, blazing over from close range as Brown came out.

Wales’s first effort on Corona’s goal arrived after 25 minutes but Hal Robson-Kanu could not make a meaningful connection on Craig Bellamy’s cross as his header glanced wide. Steve Morison then failed to control Bellamy’s intelligent cutback as Wales finally showed an attacking threat.

But Mexico still looked the more likely to find an opening and Andrade, whose sharp movement from wide areas was causing major problems, again fired over before Dos Santos shot just wide of the near post after another teasing run.

Mexico got the lead their dominance deserved two minutes before the break, as Meza’s overlapping run allowed him to deliver a perfectly-judged cross that beat Chris Gunter for De Nigris to nod home.

The goal was a hammer blow to Wales, and Mexico started the second half intent on adding to their lead. Meza forced Brown into a low save before the goalkeeper made a brilliant stop from a Dos Santos header, while Héctor Moreno came within inches of tapping home captain Francisco Rodriguez’s header across the face of goal.

Coleman made a triple substitution on the hour as Sam Vokes, Simon Church and Sam Ricketts replaced Morison, Robson-Kanu and the injured Adam Matthews respectively. And it almost paid dividends as Church linked well with Bellamy, with the Liverpool striker firing narrowly over the crossbar.

De Nigris sealed the win in the 89th minute as he intelligently chested home from Andrade’s whipped delivery from the left.

Lynn ‘The Leap’ Davies on schoolboy grit in Nant-y-Moel that led to long jump gold at the Tokyo 1964 Games

Nant-y-Moel is a most unlikely place to produce an Olympic champion, I suppose. Back in the 1950s it was a typical mining village, a very small and warm community. There were no particular sporting facilities, just a rugby pitch and a football pitch. Most of my childhood was spent outdoors with my mates, roaming the Bwlch mountain.

There were two mines within a mile of my home. My father left for work at 5.30 every morning, walked the mile to the Wyndham, then go underground, and walk the best part of it back again. He would end up working underneath the house he had left an hour earlier.

I think it was the ambition of most of the mothers in the village to make sure their sons didn’t end up following in their fathers’ footsteps. There was a big emphasis on making sure you passed the 11-plus exam.

I loved rugby and football, although they wouldn’t let a football anywhere near the grounds of Ogmore grammar school. We only did athletics on one day of the year, on sports day. We’d wander up to The Planker, the local playing field, where there was a very rough and ready long-jump pit, which the council used to fill with two tons of sand each May.

I jumped about 21ft on very raw natural ability, so my sports teacher, Royden Thomas, said: “We’ll have to enter you in the Glamorgan schools athletic championship.”

That was at Maindy stadium in Cardiff. It was a very big step up for me and on the day I was competing, Ron Pickering was there. He had just been appointed the national athletics coach for Wales, and he told me I could be a very good athlete if I started training properly.

If I hadn’t met Ron that day, I doubt very much I would have become an athlete at all. He was such an inspiring figure, he convinced me it was the right way to go, even if it meant giving up playing rugby and football.

I was chosen to run the 100 yards, the 100-yard relay and the long jump in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. I went there thrilled to be selected but with no real expectation. My aim in the long jump was to get to the final and maybe get on to the podium if things went my way.

On the day the weather was atrocious – wind, rain, very cold, not at all conducive to events like the long jump. Who knows, perhaps my upbringing in Nant-y-Moel and the wilds of the Bwlch mountain helped me through to win the gold medal?

The family home was in Commercial Street, where my mother had a draper’s shop. When I got back after Tokyo, the council had painted two red lines 26ft 5in apart on the pavement outside my house. It was quite funny watching people from the window trying to beat the jump.

I don’t know if the lines are still there. I no longer have any family ties in Nant-y-Moel, and I’ll have already run my leg of the torch relay in Cardiff by the time it reaches the village.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the land was scarred by decades of mining. But these days, looking through what we call the keyhole at the top of the Bwlch, it is a beautiful sight.