The British love to complain when their sporting heroes do not perform to some idealised yardstick of achievement. Howls of horror greeted the early bath taken by the English cricket team in the recent World Cup, and expectations, nurtured from our soccer triumph in 1966 still live on that our nation should furnish the champions of the football world.

But is Britain really the true home of world champions for physical competition or do we excel in a more cerebral department?

A few years ago I engaged in the delightful exercise of selecting the top 100 geniuses of all time for my book Buzan's Book of Genius, co-written with The Times chess correspondent Raymond Keene. It is striking just how many of those whose brilliant achievements virtually forced themselves onto the list come from the British Isles. For example, William Shakespeare, Sir Isaac Newton, Queen Elizabeth I, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell, John Milton, George Stephenson, Francis Crick, Sir Christopher Wren, Stephen Hawking and the list goes on . . .

Only now, for example, is the true story being written of the great brains who helped the Allies to win the Second World War by cracking the Nazi codes at Station X, Bletchley Park.

It was the deliberate policy of those who set up the code-breaking teams to recruit chess masters.

Among the most prominent were Harry Golombek, for many years chess correspondent of The Times, and Sir Stuart Milner-Barry, another former Times chess correspondent and several times member of the British chess team. Most notable of all was C. H. O. D. Alexander CBE, a brilliant mathematician, British chess champion and chess correspondent for The Sunday Times and The Spectator. These three were instrumental in deciphering the Nazi Naval Enigma.

Now more than ever, those in the know are recognising that it is mental values that will determine success in the modern world. For example, in The Times on June 24 Anatole Kaletsky wrote of: "A world economy where the only commodities of lasting value are imagination, intelligence and understanding of human behaviour." He went on to say: "Britain is now more dependent than any other major European economy on knowledge-intensive financial and business services."

The activities at the Mind Sports Olympiad are divided broadly into two categories, yet both of them together provide a powerful metaphor for intelligence and the workings of the human brain. On the one side we have complicated games of strategy and tactics such as chess, XiangQi and Shogi, the last of which has ten million registered devotees in Japan.

Even more popular in the Orient and well represented at the Olympiad is the Eastern game of Go. Widely regarded as the most difficult board game ever developed, simple to learn yet virtually impossible to play perfectly, it has repelled all efforts by computer programmers to penetrate its mysteries. The best computer programs for Go can still attain only the level of an intelligent 11-year-old.

On the other hand, the Olympiad has revolutionised modes of thinking and transformed them into competitive sports. The mental skills division includes the eighth World Memory Championship, where Andi Bell will be defending his title against all-comers, the Speed Reading World Championship and the Mind Mapping World Championship as well as mental calculations, intelligence and creative thinking.

There is no necessity to learn new rules or absorb complicated instructions to compete in these activities. Memory, reading, calculation and IQ are the common currency of everyday thinking and human mental activity. You will encounter champions at the Mind Sports Olympiad in games so complicated they would have given a headache to Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein, but it has also happened that entrants have walked in off the street and come out the same day newly crowned as the champion in the competitive version of a standard mental skill.

The author is President of the Mind Sports Council