The shock comes if - like me - you'd only previously read Hitch's casually magisterial denunciation of organised sport, in Newsweek last year: "Fool's Gold: How the Olympics and other international competitions breed conflict and bring out the worst in human nature."

Hitchens spins the globe, pointing his pen at El Salvador and Honduras, Egypt and Algeria, Canada's recent Olympic attempt to "Own The Podium", et al. "Whether it's the exacerbation of national rivalries that you want... or the exhibition of the most depressing traits of human personality... you need only look to the wide world of sports for the most rank and vivid examples."

This argument, as Hitchens himself points out, isn't new. In 1945, a few months after the end of the war, George Orwell published "The Sporting Spirit".

Orwell then produces six of the most famous words about sport, at the end of this savage paragraph: "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting."

The point about a good essay is not - necessarily - that you stroke your chin and say: yes, exactly, just what I've been saying all along, glad someone agrees. Some (most?) essays should prick and provoke. They should give the comfortable backside of conventional wisdom a good shoeing.

On the surface, Hitchens' sport-related essay in "Arguably" is altogether gentler. It's an appreciation of C.L.R.James - the West Indian activist, writer, historian and cricket-lover. (Of James's "Beyond A Boundary" (pub.1963), the Guardian's veteran book-reviewer Nicholas Lezard wrote: "To say 'the best cricket book ever written' is pifflingly inadequate praise.")

And so, through James, Hitchens describes cricket, as "inherently democratic... it teaches the values of equality and fairness. 'Beyond A Boundary'... is a lyrical account of both the aesthetics of batsmanship and the bonding and exemplary role played by cricket in the development of the West Indies."

The piece on James is not the most pungent, among this often wonderful exhibition of intellectual paint-stripping. I would like to have seen space, amid the eight hundred pages, for "Fool's Gold".

Because, as London 2012, Euro 2012, and all the other multinational entertainments draw close, what of our response now? "I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations... International sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred." Hitchens and Orwell: brilliant writers, powerful polemicists. Who's to say they're wrong?

Take the fabulously mis-named "serve". Some six foot five inch machine is winding up to hurl a missile at twice the national speed limit several yards beyond his opponent's arm-span. The receiver doesn't just manage to fling himself, goalie style, in the right direction. He gets his racquet to it. And somehow manages to block the ball back. He then scrambles up the cliff face so that he can continue to rally on something like level ground.

So much, so stupefying.

What we should be grateful for, is that Andy Murray gives you a sense of the effort -the unfair, unending amount of effort.

Andy Murray faces Richard Gasquet in the fourth round on Monday. Photo: Reuters

I wish I could tell you that I've observed this from the afternoons I've spent lounging on centre court, chugging Pimms and giggling with the celebs. It's not quite like that. But I have had the chance to spend hours at the practice courts, watching, close-up, the gods at play.

Number three seed, Roger Federer, is always couth, kempt and coiffed. He moves on casters. His default air is of somnolent regality.

Number one seed, Rafa Nadal, has the insouciance and cool of a Brazilian drinks waiter. If he needs to pick up a tennis ball from the ground, he doesn't do what everyone else does, and slap his racket on top of the ball so that it starts to bounce. No: he performs a sort of footballing triple salko, and juggles the ball upwards from foot to thigh to shoulder to racquet.

Number two seed, Novak Djokovic - his atypical Saturday tantrum aside - just exudes irrepressible health; he is a computer graphic-generated Australian lifeguard.
And what of number four seed, Andy Murray? He hauls his feet around, as if his shins have just been beaten with a claw hammer. His hair is a magnificently ill-tamed mess - a wild and angry copse next to the other players' manicured lawns.

They carry their demeanour on court. The other top seeds are polite sadists. When they are ahead they turn the screw. Their opponent winces and raises his arm. The umpire counts to three. The bout is over.

Andy Murray is a reluctant masochist. There are times when he appears able to find his alter ego and close a match out. But it doesn't seem to come as easily to him, this business of standing in the middle of the baseline and dictating. He seems to be more at home in Kinshasa, in 1974: Muhammad Ali sucking up George Foreman's murderous slugs, before at last punching back. Boshed into an impossible angle, yards off court, galloping at full pelt - that's when Murray will hit the unfeasible passing shot.

Sport - at its peak - reaches unknowable levels. Andy Murray's gift is to remind us how staggeringly difficult it can be.

This doesn't mean that our Lord of the Olympics is a serial apologiser. In the top ten is an article he penned for The Daily Telegraph, last year, extolling the easy thrill of running: "I always felt sorry for swimmers, confronted by thousands of metres of grouting each week."

But the question of the moment is whether that list of results (which Google accomplished in a Bolt-esque 0.06 seconds) should be added to.

Now that my wife, or I (but I hope my wife) will be booting up the computer at 0555 BST next Friday, to apply for the next tranche of tickets, is it Lord Coe's fault that one of us will be knackered and in a filthy mood for the rest of the day?

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After two sweat-stained hours spent poring over the Olympic schedule, in the run-up to the initial ballot, in which I shipped far more money than we could afford on a fiendishly clever array of tickets, I then - weeks later - spent at least that long complaining noisily by text and phone and email about the fact that I'd got none of the tickets I'd applied for.

Exhibit A was my dead cert: the early rounds of the handball. How could that possibly have been over-subscribed?

The truth is now spread before me in the 45-page document which the London 2012 Organising Committee (Locog) has helpfully supplied for those known as the "second chancers".

This doesn't just show me that there are a few sessions of "Wrestling - Greco-Roman" yet to be snapped up. But also that my strategy, so brilliantly conceived as I cackled manically over the keyboard, was also that of everybody else decadent enough to have a family, and unfortunate enough not to be a banker.

Almost all the cheap seats have gone.

Would that I'd been strong enough to use the "sorry" word myself: "Sorry, kids: we couldn't afford for all of you to take the "B" class seats at the Athletics/BMX/Handball. Two of you will have to stay at home. The can-opener's in the drawer."

So the Games Organisers - perhaps - have been a victim of their own success, and the reams of advice clever journalists have dispensed as to how punters can plan their ticket-buying tactics. The system was confusing, to those of us who didn't graduate from MIT. But it's difficult to imagine there could have been a much fairer system, the odd slew of corporate tickets aside.

Which brings us back to Sebastian Coe and the offer of a harikiri sword.

Google's top ten informs us that he did also apologise back in 2004. That was when the woman on the door of the East India Club in London asked that he produce a photo ID. Difficult to see him having to apologise these days - at least for not being recognised.

Cycling's most famous historical quotation deals not in honour, or prowess. It is a scream of rage, and an accusation of recklessness.

"Vous êtes des assassins!" shouted Octave Lapize, in 1910, as he wheeled his bike over the Col d'Aubisque. The target of his ire were the organisers of the premium race, the Tour de France. They - as now - had concocted a brutal, elongated, mountainous itinerary that became a three-week festival of pain and endurance.

Given the freakish demands expected of its competitors, and given its status as one of the oldest professional sports, allegations of an engrained culture of drug-taking have surrounded the sport ever since. But in recent times, those allegations have reached a new pitch.

Almost a century after Lapize's howl of disgust, another, equally unflattering phrase rang around the ears. It came from Dick Pound, the then head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, in 2006. Cycling, he said, "is in the toilet."

Alberto Contador is awaiting a ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to find out whether he will face a suspension for doping.

For Sylvia Schenk - an athlete, lawyer, and former member of the management committee of cycling's world governing body, the International Cycling Union (UCI) - her beloved sport has just sunk a little further into the mire. "I think it's now a disaster for the Tour," she says, speaking in the library of her Frankfurt legal offices. "Because nearly all the people winning the Tour during the last 10, 12 years have been convicted of doping or have been suspected of doping."

Among those of whom she is talking is the biggest figure of them all. Lance Armstrong won the Tour an astonishing seven times. He is currently the subject of a US federal investigation into allegations of doping. Armstrong has always robustly denied the allegations, describing himself as "the most tested athlete on the planet".

Schenk is unmoved. Testing is necessary, as a deterrent of sorts, she argues. But it is not particularly effective. "Take blood-doping. It can't be detected up to now. I'm quite sure there are other substances which the athletes take nowadays which can't at the moment be analysed. So no, positive results cannot really prove anything."

Schenk is more than just another high-ranking sports official. She has also chaired the worldwide anti-corruption group, Transparency International, which lends weight to her call for nothing short of a revolution.

"What I experienced in the cycling federations, on an international and national level, is that people are afraid. Even those who don't want doping: they are afraid of having chaos, if they start to put people away, and to change the structures.

"But I hope that one day, we will have an Egypt situation within cycling. That those who really want to change things say, 'We dare. We know there may be chaos. But in chaos, there is also an opportunity'."

Schenk says that responsibility extends beyond those directly involved in the sport - the riders, the managers, the race directors and the governing bodies. She says that sponsors, TV companies, journalists and even fans have to end their passive tolerance of abuse.

So how does that gloomy diagnosis and challenging cure go down with cycling enthusiasts? On a cold grey evening, not far from Heathrow airport, about 100 amateurs, along with the odd pro, have turned out for a "Regional C+" race, at Hillingdon Cycle Circuit. The entry fee is £10. First prize will be £30.

Among the men in lycra, there is consensus that grassroots cycling is in rude health, especially at volunteer-run clubs such as this.

But there is exasperation at the antics of those at the pinnacle of the sport. "Of course it upsets me," says the lean, grey-haired Dominic Gabellini, 55. "It gives very bad publicity to the sport. I would say 99.9% of riders around me here are clean. They don't deserve this type of publicity."

Tony Gibb, 34, is involved both as a rider, and in covering the sport for TV. "It bothers me, because it's my sport. Every year, with the Tour de France, you sort of hold your breath and just pray that there's not stories coming out about this person doing that and this person doing this, and doping rings in Spain, France or Italy or wherever."

UCI president Pat McQuaid

In the past, the UCI has been accused of being flaccid, at best, in the fight against doping. Critics point, incredulously, to the UCI's acceptance of a large donation from Lance Armstrong in 2002, despite the dangers of a clear conflict of interest. Now, though, the UCI's president, Pat McQuaid is sounding tough.

"I'm not particularly happy that there are team managers in the sport who have been doping as athletes themselves," McQuaid told the BBC. "And I'm not particularly happy that they understand the responsibility they have to this sport."

As a result, McQuaid has revealed to the BBC his plan to change cycling's rules: "Any cyclist who is involved in a doping infraction in their career cannot come back into management of a team in the future." McQuaid will bring his proposal before the management committee of the UCI in June. "We do suffer," he says, "and all sports suffer, from the fact that athletes tend to become officials afterwards. There's a constant circle, and it's very hard to break."

Those in charge of cycling, McQuaid among them, insist that their sport is in the vanguard of the fight against doping - a model to others. A hugely embarrassing leak, last week, suggested that, privately, even they would concede how far there is yet to go.

The French sports newspaper, L'Equipe, published the UCI's confidential doping "scale of suspicion" for all 198 participants in last year's Tour de France. It made for awkward reading all round. The question now is whether one of the dirtiest sports can lead the cleanup.

Joe Papp is a 35 year old man who hopes his life has not been destroyed.

Papp lives in a quiet, well-heeled suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In July, he may be sentenced to 10 years in prison. His story, of the professional cyclist who became a doper and then a dealer, is extreme. But its power lies in what he and many others say is its reflection of a deeply entrenched culture of drug-taking in road-racing.

Cycling is one of the world's major sports and, perhaps more than any other, it has always had its doping scandals. But now it has reached a critical point. Last year's winner of the biggest race - the Tour de France - is the Spaniard Alberto Contador. He is planning to race again this year but that depends on the result of an arbitration hearing into his positive test in the 2010 edition.

In the States, the most famous cyclist of them all - and one of the biggest sporting celebrities in the world - Lance Armstrong, is being investigated by the federal authorities over allegations of doping. Cycling's governing body says it is now leading the fight against drugs. Others on the inside say the sport is in a state of denial and risking collapse. So who is right?

Joe Papp faces up to 10 years in jail for supplying drugs

That was when Papp's uncle bought him his first multi-gear bike. Papp turned pro at 19. He started doping at 26. When I ask him why, he exhales deeply.

"Honestly and genuinely, it was just because I wanted to continue competing at the level that I had been competing at. It wasn't about earning extra money. It was simply a desire to remain competitive against other riders who appeared to me and my team-mates to be artificially enhancing their performance."

It was a team-mate and his wife who introduced Papp to his first doping doctor. Papp said he was pulled in two directions. "I knew deep down it was unethical and unsporting. I was also terrified about becoming a drug addict: I didn't take cough medicine, or aspirin, or vitamin supplements up to that point. At the same time, it was a glowing orb of possibility, and a solution to remaining competitive. I succeeded for quite a few years in thinking about it only as a professional necessity. Just another tool."

And he says he was not alone. From the start of the decade, up to 2006, when he tested positive, "almost to a T, every one of my team-mates doped." He says there were several exceptions. But they were just that: exceptions. The fact that he was not at the pinnacle of his sport (although for a time he was, on International Cycling Union (UCI) points, the leading US rider in three regions) makes him believe that doping was pervasive throughout cycling, "the modus operandi for a significant number of athletes."

From nervous beginner, Papp ended up ingesting and injecting a baroque cocktail of drugs. He experimented widely. His staple involved EPO, HGH, testosterone, steroids and amphetamines. He was able to rider "harder, faster, for longer, day after day."

He insists it was easy to evade the testers. When he was caught, in 2006, it was "ironically for something I never knowingly took." One reason that the testing regime was weak, he claims, was "the official subversion of the anti-doping process, to protect the image of the race, the athlete, the team. People who were representative of the international level of cycling were involved in that." It was a process, he said, that he participated in at least half a dozen times.

When he did, finally, test positive, Papp decided to fold rather than fight. He says that many of his fellow riders saw that as the crime - "spitting in the soup", they call it in cycling. Most of his former team-mates and friends in the sport disowned him.

But even as he began to co-operate with sport's anti-doping agency, he also started dealing in performance-enhancing drugs. He supplied, in total, about 200 athletes. After a year, he was busted by the police.

After a number of delays, Papp is due to be sentenced, in court, in July. He could face up to 10 years in jail. His hope is that testimony from the US Anti-Doping Agency, which describes Papp's subsequent help in a "significant number of cases" as "very, very helpful", will be used in mitigation.

Papp readily concedes that his actions were stupid and destructive - but he also says it was easy because of the culture of doping in the sport. It is a culture which, he says, has yet to be eradicated.

The only solution, he argues, is for the matter to be seen less as a sporting problem, and more as criminal one.

"We've seen over and over again that the athletes can't be trusted to do the right thing; administrators and officials are always going to be subject to undue influence, being corrupted, and the criminal element is entrenched. The only ultimate answer is to dissuade people by threatening their freedom."

What gives Papp's prescription power is that imprisonment is a prospect he himself faces, come July. And he is candid about that prospect.

"I am utterly terrified, and fearful to a degree I've never experienced in my life. It's primordial, what I feel almost every waking minute. I understand that I violated the laws of my country, and the rules of my sport, and I need to be held accountable for that, to dissuade others. I just hope that the process of doing that isn't one that ultimately sees me done in."

This got me thinking: was Joan Rivers right?

The expensively reconstructed septuagenarian comedian famously threw down a high-wicking gauntlet, confident in the knowledge no-one could pick it up. "The first time I see a jogger smiling," she said, "I'll consider it."

For a short while, I attempted to take on the challenge.

Halfway through my routine run, I'd break into what I imagine was a grin - as if, at that moment, Joan might appear, laden with bags, out of the local 99p store.

But she was never there to receive my look of pleasure. The only obvious effect was that mothers would cross the road and I would get a stitch.

A proper runner: Robin Harvie at a checkpoint along the 245-km route of the Spartathlon

It's a wonderfully written book, a poke in the eye to those who believe athletes cannot find the words to take you into their esoteric, high-performance world - in Robin Harvie's case, that of ultra-marathons.

But I feared his "we" of the title excluded me. He celebrates pain: "I took to wearing black bin-liners under long-sleeved tops and on the hottest day of the English summer ran 20 miles up the river, wearing four layers, a woolly hat and sunglasses."

Later, he attains a spiritual merging of body and landscape, forgetting that he was running at all, "drifting on the air like a sycamore seed".

He also appears to disparage what for most of us is the ne plus ultra: "the marathon," he writes, "is really a spectator sport, and a false measure against which to measure our true capacity." For those of us with all of Emil Zapotek's air-clawing running style and none of his talent, that sounds a tad sniffy.

This is no false bravado, though. On Sunday, Harvie is running the London marathon - twice. He's starting at Big Ben at 0400 BST on race day and running to Greenwich. Then he'll join the other 30,000 and run back. (He's raising money for Mind, should you wish to contribute.)

But in person, Harvie is more generous to those of us who have - if only once - heaved our way around the marathon course. "It always gets to me," he says, "how, in the last mile, friends clap you on the back and tell you that you look great. They've no idea how painful it is."

But why place pain on a pedestal?

"I can understand that life is tough," says the 34 year-old with a day job as a publisher and a young family. "There are mortgages, kids, we get up early. But if you wake up and think - I want to do something for myself, I want to find out who I am, what I can withstand. Well, then pain is inevitably going to feature in that discovery."

An improper runner: Tim Franks running alongside Gazan long-distance athlete Nader el-Masri

That is true. Pain and iron self-discipline are, at least, unavoidable by-products of training for and then running a marathon. And, like Harvie, I was drawn to the idea of pushing myself after I'd become lost on a Saturday afternoon jog.

In his case, he ended up running 35 miles. In my case, it was a rather weedier 30-minute attempted loop in a forest in Belgium eight years ago, which turned into a then-shocking 80 minutes.

I had other incentives to run the London marathon. The schoolboy desire to take part in a major, televised sporting event. And the impetus to slay demons hatched at school, as the boy whom one particular red-faced PE master would bark and snort at. (I held what I'm sure was a school record, as the only boy to be lapped in the 1500 metres.)

But now? Would that I could claim to experience the "merging of consciousness and landscape" which Harvie writes about.

But I guess my riposte to Joan Rivers is that I run, not because a smile splits my face but because I can't afford plastic surgery, or even gym membership and I don't have an east African physique. I run because I want to stave off senescence. I run because I have to.

But don't imagine that Gothenburg is dull. Because Sweden's second city harbours a global one-off.

One of its professional footballers is openly gay.

 

Anton still lives at home, with his mother. In their bright, white living room, Anton is spooning a vat of pasta and meatballs into his mouth, before he heads off to Monday night training.

He exudes quiet self-assurance: "I'm sure of who I am," he says. "I was born this way. I have nothing to hide." He was surprised, he says, about what a stir - globally - his announcement caused. "But everyone's been really positive," he says.

His mother, Helena, is proud. But as Anton wanders into the kitchen to collect his dessert, she also says that she's worried. "There was an ice hockey player," Helena recalls. "He was stabbed for being gay." She is talking of Peter Karlsson, murdered in 1995 by a Swedish neo-Nazi.

Anton, though, remains both relaxed and bemused. He's been inundated with gifts, messages of support, and invitations to swanky events. "Just because I'm gay doesn't mean I want to go," he says of the latest request. "I hate the Eurovision Song Contest."

His sexuality should not, Anton, asserts be "a big thing". But it is. The reason is that of all the professional footballers playing among Uefa's member associations - let alone those playing in other countries around the world - there appears to be no other avowedly gay player.

The Guardian newspaper's "Secret Footballer" (its anonymous Premier League-playing columnist) says that "the changing room is a very harsh place to survive", but intimates that the banter would not be any worse for a player because of his sexuality, as opposed to, say, his haircut.

So what of the Utsiktens BK changing room? Niklas Tidstrand plays alongside Anton in midfield, and is a friend. He says half the team knew even before Anton came out in public, but still it's been tough. "It's hard to be a gay player," he says. "Because there are so many jokes about 'playing like a man'."

And there's the very rarity of it. "It's really crazy. When we started to talk about this, maybe two years ago, we searched on Google for "gay football players" - and nothing, nothing, it's just jokes. It's scary. So many are gay, but no-one wants to say before their career is over."

And the reason for that was laid bare in the campaign organised by the English FA. Last year, it had to delay the release of its anti-homophobia video, because it couldn't find a footballer to back the message, publicly.

Anton's father, Glenn, knows about English football. Before the 1989/90 season, he signed for Liverpool, and - according to the Independent newspaper, in October 1989 - was a "defender of such class and distinction... (he) has probably altered the course of English football history." Glenn played alongside the "equally cultured" Alan Hansen, and under Kenny Dalglish, and took Liverpool to their last League title.

As it happens, this was just a year before Justin Fashanu became the only English player to come out. Later, after his career had ended, Fashanu hanged himself.

Glenn is still heavily involved in the game, as a commentator and as a coach at Utsiktens. And he, too, is proud of his son. He's fatalistic about the abuse which may yet be hurled at his family. "I haven't heard any bad things yet," he says. "But they will come." He, his other football-playing son, and Anton may all be targets. "But so what? There's going to be some shouting. But I've told Anton, just to forget it."

There hasn't been any trouble so far. Crowds are small, as the teams are still playing only warm-up games, at the end of the long winter break. But as we crunch over the ice and gravel towards the training pitch, Anton says that he's just received his first hate mail.

"I just got a mail from someone who lives around here, who said 'I'm never going to come to your games again, because you've got a faggot in your team'. So what am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to cry in a corner for you?"

On one thing Anton, his father Glenn, his team-mate Niklas, and - for what it's worth - I, agree. It's ridiculous that this is a story at all. As with Steven Davies, English cricket's freshly out gay wicketkeeper, why should we care about a sports star's sexuality - why should it remotely be our business?

The answer may lie, in part, in football's commanding heights. Only three months ago, Fifa boss Sepp Blatter couldn't resist sniggering, in public, about how gay people might have to comport themselves in conservative Qatar, come the 2022 World Cup.

Perhaps there's a neat symmetry here. At 20, Anton Hysen looks and sounds the part of a modern footballer. And 75-year-old Sepp Blatter sounded then as if he hadn't moved on from the world he inhabited at the age of 20.

Football may like to present itself now as a shiny bauble of high-tech boots, high-definition TV and billion-pound tournaments. But in some of its thinking, it remains mired in the days when food was rationed, toilets were outside, and homosexuality was illegal.

It's just that it's much too sweet, too heavy and too strong. At the same time, though, as a venal hack, give me a story about a brewery, even a Trappist brewery, and I'll clear the diary.

So, in 2005, as the BBC's Europe correspondent, in Brussels, imagine my delight when the radio desk in London rang to say that the monks at the Westvleteren brewery had been awarded Best Beer of the World gong for their Westvleteren 12. My brow only clouded when I smacked nose-first into the wall of silence, known as the Trappist Vow. No voices, no piece. The report for Radio 4 never made it to air.

Is there a risk that Sir Alex Ferguson, and now all of MUFC management's, pointed silence could have the same wounding effect?

Sir Alex Ferguson refused to talk to the media after Manchester United's loss to Liverpool

There is one clear and immediate upside. We don't have to listen to Mike Phelan. I'm sure he's a lovely chap - and a wonderful coach.

But anybody happening to listen to an uncut, three-minute post-match interview with United's assistant coach will find themselves unwittingly proving Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. Time is not a constant.

There you are, looking vacantly at the internet, with the sound turned up. Suddenly, it's as if you're travelling at close to the speed of the light. The tick of the clock slows dramatically.

By the time Mike's said goodbye, your kids may have left home. It can be quite upsetting.

For those who are able to snap back to Earth time, there may be more immediate concerns. Man U fans have got in touch with the BBC to say that they wanted, and were denied, updates on Nani's gashed leg. Even the best of intentions were left unrequited.

So is there anything to be done?

A Premier League official, speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested probably not. "Manchester United and Sir Alex Ferugson are an anomaly," he said. "The idea that you're going to radically alter the behaviour of someone who's approaching his 70th year, after 20-odd years in management at Manchester United, is unlikely."

It might be possible to change the rules so that - Uefa style - managers are compelled to give pre and post-match news conferences.

But that would take agreement among the 20 Premier League chairmen at their next AGM, in the summer. You might have to travel from Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity (see above) to quantum physics to measure how much the other clubs care about MUFC's PR.

One elegant solution may be found if we glance across the Atlantic, at football's American cousin. The NFL fined Randy Moss of the Minnesota Vikings £15,500 ($25,000) for failing to talk to the media. Mr Moss responded by interviewing himself - a hint of monomania rarely seen since Julius Caesar, Napoleon or Cristiano Ronaldo.

But maybe the truth is that we shouldn't flinch in terror at the silence of the football manager. Sport is about what you see on the pitch, as they say, just as concerts are about what you hear.

Music critics don't hang around in a room off the Royal Festival Hall, ready to pepper Daniel Barenboim with pointed questions about his fingering in the last movement of the Appassionata. "What were you thinking about, going 4-4-2," they might ask, "when everyone else is going 4-5-1?"

Or perhaps it's just because Sir Alex has never, in truth, been able to top his sub-haiku offering of 1999. After "football - bloody hell", what remains to be said?

The warning was based on the premise that if you take the 2012 logo to pieces, close one eye, inhale some pure alcohol, and hold your pencil like a ladle, you can re-organise the logo into spelling "Zion". Which, sharp readers will be aware, are the first four letters of "Zionism" - aka Iranian enemy ideology number one.

The Iranian Olympic Committee have threatened to boycott the games over the 2012 logo

One of our reporters - who happens to be a happy marriage of genial and sharp -- narrowed his eyes. His opinion was that we risked puffing a press release, with little chance of the threat ever coming to pass.

My instinct was that it was a story. That initial feeling had a slight wobble when I then googled "Iran 2012 Zion", to check when the accusation had previously been made. Top of the search results was an entry on www.davidicke.com (slogan: "Exploring the dreamworld we believe to be real.")

To be fair to the 2012 logo, it has also, previously, been accused of being a fractured swastika. To be unfair to the 2012 logo, it's also widely regarded as rubbish.

But I thought it was a story because it showed how Middle Eastern minds can work. And on the cusp of the F1 season, what a canard it is that politics and sport can somehow live in separate rooms.

Separated by a Gulf

Just the other side of the (Persian or Arabian) Gulf, Qatar recently displayed another way to handle the Zionist entity.

One of the swankiest parts of Qatar's very swanky promotional campaign, ahead of the award of the 2022 World Cup, involved a 3-sided cinema presentation for the FIFA honchos. At one point during the interminably swelling music, all 4,513 flags of the FIFA member nations (American Samoa anyone?) swirled across the screens.

If you were willing to engage in a spot of Cirque du Soleilesque contortionism on your deep leather chair, then you could just catch, creeping on, at the end, at the very bottom of the far right screen, the Israeli flag.

Israel and Qatar, just like Israel and Iran, don't have diplomatic relations.

As a former Middle East correspondent, old questions died hard. "In the fabulously unlikely event of Israel's mediocre team qualifying for the 2022 World Cup," I later asked one august Qatari member of the bid team, "how would you feel about playing the Israeli national anthem at one of your stadiums?"

"No problem at all," he smiled back at me. "Our relationship with Israel is very - sophisticated."

"We don't do politics"

All of which brings us neatly back to the thoughts of Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone.

It was he who told my BBC colleague Dan Roan "We've never been involved in religion or politics." Taking the same approach as a disestablished monarch, he went on: "It's not for us to run a country."

Mr Ecclestone was speaking about whether the first grand prix of the season should take place in demonstration-torn Bahrain.

A fair amount of coughing and gagging sounds were heard in the wake of that interview.

This was, after all, the same Mr Ecclestone who'd given the Labour party a million quid as it glided into government in 1997. This may have been because a) he'd just read "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists", and was pumped about the heirs of socialism gaining power, b) he'd beaten the Prime Minister in a game of no-limit Texas Hold 'Em or c) the new Labour government was considering banning F1 from taking fag packet ads.

Even if it were true, and that's a house-style-busting bold/embossed/italicised/gothicfont "even if" - that the juntas who run sports would rather not sully their pure pursuits with "religion" or "politics" or "governing" - it's still tough bananas.

You may not want to do religion or politics. But they will do you.