The IOC publish an interesting, if self-serving, document called Olympic Marketing Matters. The June edition is masterful in its heavy-hitting roll of honour. Scot Rank, director of Worldwide CocaCola, Dick Ebersol, president of NBC, Paul Allaire, chairman of Rank Xerox, Nicholas Hayek, president of Swatch, and Phil Guarascio, vice-president of General Motors, put pen to paper to say how the Olympic movement has emerged from recent crisis shining and as marketable as ever.

Between the "profound regrets" expressed by various big-wigs in the IOC, including president Juan Antonio Samaranch, and the $3.5 billion the organisation will generate between Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000, the IOC fail to mention how much money the corporations of each of the above have pumped into the Olympic movement over the years and how much it would cost them if the Olympic image remained tarnished. Quite a lot, one might have thought.