Right from the inception of the modern Olympic Games, culture has always tried to elbow its way into the party. The idealistic twinning of sport and the arts as a recipe to stiffen the moral fibre of the world's youth was a fundamental principle of the Games' founder Pierre de Coubertin.

So taken were he and his cohorts by the idea, that he was himself awarded a gold medal in the Stockholm Games of 1912, for his pseudonymously-entered poem "Ode to Sport" (well it was never going to be a paean to lounging in a deck chair listening to Edwardian parlour songs).