Few organisations in the world are more responsive to popular tastes and passions than the Coca-Cola Company. That is why it has been a major sponsor of the Olympic Games for longer than any other global brand. That is also why it has withdrawn from this year's Olympic torch relay in Japan - where it feared its open-topped “Coke” bus might attract the wrath of Buddhist protesters - and why its chairman responded thoughtfully and at length to a Tibetan protester at the company's annual shareholder meeting this week in Delaware. But the same responsiveness makes it hard to imagine the company will scale back its involvement in the Beijing Games themselves: China is one of its biggest growth markets, contributing by one estimate six per cent of its total revenues.

A corporate boycott of the Games would not just be self-defeating. It would be as ill-advised as a political one, interpreted by athletes and the Chinese people alike as punishing them rather than the government in Beijing. This does not invalidate the protests that have followed the Olympic torch across five continents. But it does oblige Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee, to take urgent and radical steps in response to his own assessment of the Olympic movement as “in crisis”.

Amid the negative headlines that have chronicled the build-up to every Olympiad in living memory except Sydney's, it is easy to forget the extent to which the Games are a victim of their own success. They can bankrupt host cities and humiliate athletes caught abusing drugs, but the genuine, thrilling sporting contests they still stage make them an unrivalled magnet for sponsorship, broadcasting fees and public money lavished in pursuit of national prestige. They are the greatest show on Earth. But they are played out on such a scale that it is pointless to pretend, as the Beijing Organising Committee continues to do, that they are not political. If the Olympics were truly about sport and nothing else it would not matter where they were held or by what tortuous route their torch reached the stadium. As it is, Lord Coe must be grateful London is not staging this year's Games. Protests over the Iraq war might long since have eclipsed his themes of sustainability and sport for youth.

It is to London that Mr Rogge should now be looking to restore the Olympic movement's vitality and sense of purpose. In doing so he should not be afraid to heed the advice of the great Sir Roger Bannister on these pages, and think the unthinkable. It may be too late to move the 2012 Games from London to a permanent venue on, say, the slopes of Mt Olympus. But it is not too late to veto elaborate international torch relays. Despite the evidence of recent Games these are not an Olympic sport and they were anyway conceived, inauspiciously, by the Nazis. Nor is it too late to cut back the schedule of events to exclude sports, football and tennis among them, which already have greater prizes than an Olympic gold medal. More broadly, Mr Rogge should urge London to invoke the spirit of 1948, the last year in which it hosted the Games.

Barely 4000 athletes competed and the event cost £750,000 to stage - but it is remembered not for its modest scale but for the rebirth of the Olympic spirit after another, much deeper, crisis. London can do it again.