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Shortly before the Olympic torch began its contentious journey, the man most responsible for lumbering us with the 2012 games shared his thoughts about the forthcoming protest. "Sporting chivalrous contest helps knit the bonds of peace between nations," declared Lord Sebastian Coe on Radio 5Live, defending the holding of this naff little ceremony in the light of events surrounding Tibet.
Sorry, hang on a moment, it wasn't Lord Coe who gave this quote yesterday morning. It was Adolf Hitler, greeting the inaugural torch relay in 1936.
What Seb in fact said yesterday was: "I've always firmly believed that international sport has done more to bring disparate communities together - sometimes countries barely on speaking terms - than, frankly, most politicians."
Apologies for the error, but you can see how easily it was made when they were saying exactly the same thing.
Hitler presented this template for the sport-brings-peace imbecility before the Berlin games, designed by their hosts to glorify the Third Reich. That year, unsurprisingly, there was a boycott row as well, particularly in the US until the will of Avery Brundage, resolutely anti-semitic President of the American Olympic Committee, won out.
Brundage dismissed objections with the line that politics has no role in sport, and Seb evidently agrees (sort of).
"This is about sport," he said of the relay, with an air of finality implying that, although sport need only wave its magic wand to sprinkle peace and goodwill, it still somehow has nothing to do with politics.
However, confused he sounded (I blame Freud Communications for failing to provide a more coherent memo for Coe, Sir Steve Redgrave and all the other relay participants they coached on the official line to take), I am in no way suggesting that Seb is insincere.
He may well believe this specious gibberish about the power of sporting inclusivity to tear down the walls of totalitarianism.
If so, he forgets that the 1936 torch relay, despite Hitler's optimism, fell tantalisingly short of persuading the Fuhrer to rethink his plans; that the Tibetan brutality has come a full seven years after the IOC handed China the games; and that ostracising South Africa from the sporting community played an absolutely central psychological role in bringing about the demise of apartheid.
Perhaps it's unfair to pick on Seb for showing the same moral cowardice we see from Gordon Brown and others who view yesterday's protest as a tiresome threat to the smooth PR campaign for 2012.
Not for a moment, however, should this "Olympic ideal" hypocrisy be treated with anything but raging contempt, because the primary purpose of the 2008 Games, far from being to cajole China towards the civilised world, is to imbue a deeply disgusting regime with a veneer of global respectability.
Eerily echoing Avery Brundage, Lord Coe yesterday said that "there has never been a more important time to defend the autonomy of international sport".
An hour later, the protesters expressed their belief that there has never been a more important time to defend Tibet, and the ambition of Chinese citizens to win the freedoms we enjoy here.
"I recognise that London is an open, democratic city," added Lord Coe, acknowledging the fundamental human right of peaceful protest, albeit begrudgingly. How depressing, though, that he and this Labour government remain so blithely indifferent to supporting the extension of that right to those in the Olympic ideal's next port of call who would love to do the same without inviting the fate of their heroic predecessors in Tiananmen Square.
• While he prepares for the last throw of the seasonal dice at Anfield tomorrow night, Arsene Wenger is presented with a devilish conundrum.
With his domestic ambitions finally killed off by Saturday's home draw against Liverpool, Wenger can no longer be the Premier League king.
But he can still be the kingmaker and his dilemma concerns which of his rivals he wishes to crown least.
The maths, after Manchester United's draw at Middlesbrough, is simple.
Should Chelsea win all their fixtures, including at home to United, Sir Alex's chaps must win all their other remaining fixtures to take the title on goal difference. This is what makes Arsenal's visit to Old Trafford next Sunday pivotal.
With nothing to play for but pride, or preferably spite, Wenger could punish Fergie for the years of pizza-tossing enmity by sending his team out, as he did for the 2005 FA Cup Final, purely to hold United to a 0-0 draw.
Should he conclude that he loathes Chelsea even more, for the Jose Mourinho dossier and other sins, he can play his toddlers in the knowledge that the infants will lose.
If the sense of power dulls his pain over Arsenal's failure, all well and good. But what a choice he faces, and the sadness for Wenger - a poignancy familiar to us all from Germany v Argentina World Cup Finals - is that, whichever way he plumps, there has to be a winner at all.
Hard to begrudge Timmy's touching triumph
• The Grand National no longer produces shock winners, but it's lost none of its knack for triumph-over-tragedy stories. This year's probably won't become a Bob Champion-style movie, but jockey Timmy Murphy's emergence as the first recovering alcoholic jailbird since Tony Adams to win a lustrous British sporting honour is touching enough all the same.
Murphy did his bird in 2002 for an indecent assault on an airline stewardess, and his personal history makes it hard even for me to resent failing to back the winner for the 35th year running. The winner's odds suggest that a lot of people did, though, and I hope that includes Max Mosley.
Max could use a lift right now, and he should have lumped on Comply Or Die because that must be the translation, from the original German, of something he said to one of his lady friends in the dungeon.
Sour taste in Peter's Cup
• Good old Parky, so bravely defiant after his beloved Barnsley's FA Cup semi-final loss to Cardiff City. We hadn't seen that wounded smile since Miss Piggy rejected him all those years ago. I wish they'd done it myself, although solely to keep that self-aggrandising schmendrick Peter Ridsdale out of the royal box next month as Cardiff chairman.
Ordinarily, the genuine prospect of a lower division club winning the Cup for the first time since 1980 would gladden the neutral heart. But not this time. Ridsdale deserved a lifetime ban from boardrooms for the destruction he unleashed on Leeds United. It will therefore be a moral obligation to support Honest Harry Redknapp in his noble quest to restore romance to the Cup by becoming the first manager out on police bail to lift the trophy.
Reader views (1)
I have comments regarding your article "Shameful echoes etc". Firstly, with respect to the Olympic Games, I cannot understand how you can conjure up such anti-Games sentiment purely because of events in Berlin in 1936. What precisely does this have to do with London's campaign to host the Games in 2012? Is this some personal vendetta on your part driven by other prejudices such as your favourite topic of anti-semitism? Surely the world would be poorer if no Games were to take place? This is despite the obvious disadvantages of having an illiberal government sponsoring the Games. I found your article pointless and irrelevant in the extreme. It was obviously authored by your alter ego, Mr Phil Space.
- John Zazzera, London UK, 09/04/2008 00:19
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