The Beijing Organising Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, better known by its more manageable though hardly poetic acronym BOCOG, is in many ways a formidable machine.

Nearly seven years after its creation, following Beijing’s successful bid to host the Games, BOCOG has a staff of more than 7,000 people – and has plenty of clout to tap the talents of more. Arrangements for media coverage of parts of the Olympic Torch Relay, for example, were handled directly by the provincial propaganda offices of the Communist party. And in the run-up to the Games, whole sections of the Beijing city bureaucracy were seconded to the gleaming new BOCOG tower on the city’s fourth ring road.