The old adage, “Keep politics out of sport” is rarely heard these days – tacit acknowledgement that the two are inextricable. Things have quietened down since the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly two decades ago, but memories of successive Olympic boycotts – by the US of Moscow in 1980 and the Soviet Union of Los Angeles four years later – remain strong.

This link between politics and the Games was again illustrated this year with the reaction to the Olympic torch relay, which the Chinese hosts intended as a propaganda coup but which spectacularly misfired amid mass protests against Chinese policy in Tibet.