Is there, in the history of human literature, a document more spuriously idealistic, more breathtakingly drunk on its own self-importance, than the Olympic Charter? It is all “preservation of human dignity” this and “harmonious development of man” that, as if the quadrennial festival, so beloved of dictators and tyrants, is about something more than one talented athlete trying to deny another a place on the podium.

Even at its most gallant - with sportsmen competing within the rules and not doped to their eyeballs on designer steroids - the Olympic Games are about nothing more than the naked pursuit of personal glory. I played in two Olympics and, in the first, had a gratifying victory over a taciturn if talented Frenchman. Call that a celebration of the human spirit if you wish, but please forgive me for wondering if you have your head somewhere in the clouds above Mount Olympus.

The guardians of the Olympic movement, a self-perpetuating elite who enjoy grotesque levels of personal privilege, like to tell us that the coming together of the nations of the world within the Olympic Village is particularly worthy of celebration, a claim that would be no more comical if it were made by the organisers of a gigantic widget convention.

They talk about “peace” and “solidarity” as if the village were some modern day Paris commune rather than a housing and restaurant conglomeration used by athletes for the purpose of winning medals at the expense of fellow residents. The only “coming together” I experienced was of the carnal rather than the utopian kind, although what do you expect when you accommodate 10,000 testosterone-fuelled youngsters in claustrophobic proximity?

None of this is to imply that I am against the Games. On the contrary, I love the Games: loved playing in them, love watching them, love writing about them. But it will not do, intellectually or morally, to impute to them a meaning that they do not possess except in the minds of those naive enough to swallow the propaganda of the IOC, an organisation so corrupt that its members deserve medals for spouting this idealistic nonsense with straight faces.

Those who actually play high-level sport perceive that the meaning of victory is to be glimpsed not in the abstractions of the charter but in the anguish of defeat. Economists call it a zero-sum game: my success is synonymous with your failure, my joy with your despair, my glory with your ignominy.

Theorists puzzled that the rise in general living standards of recent decades has not increased the sum of human happiness should examine the real Olympic ideal. Baron de Coubertin grasped that humans are not turned on by shared rewards but only by rewards that are denied to others. At bottom, the Olympic festival is capitalism without the subtlety: elitist, cruel and implacably amoral. That is why we enjoy it so much.

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