TELEGRAPH UK Sprinter, sailor, torchbearer, chef... those who have paved the way to the London Games are the subject of an inspiring new show Aiming High at the National Portrait Gallery, says Jim White.

It is an extraordinary structure, swirling upwards, outwards and downwards simultaneously, a swoosh of an Olympic totem that seems to defy all established boundaries of physics. Not Anish Kapoor’s Orbit, the supersize steel sculpture that dominates the Olympic park, but Boris Johnson’s hair. As captured by Jillian Edelstein in a new exhibition of work at the National Portrait Gallery, the London mayor’s barnet is a mane of quiet magnificence, the stylish epitome of indifference to styling. Looking at the work, you imagine, hovering just off camera, a small army of mayoral aides who carry with them the official hedge through which their man is regularly dragged backwards in order to achieve the required effect of studied enrumplement.
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