You have to strain quite hard to place women's beach volleyball in a context any more curious than the one it already inhabits, given that this is a sport played by four sleek women wearing bikinis the size of postage stamps (the maximum dimensions being ordained in the rules. Really).

But yesterday's Olympic match between Russia and Georgia in Beijing may have managed it. Even as a Russian military convoy was trundling around Georgia, and as Georgia's leaders were wailing about the outrage of Russia's entry into a neighbouring sovereign state, the Russian team, kitted out in blue-and-white bikinis, were being knocked out of the tournament by the team representing Georgia, dressed in lipstick red.

What words do you use to describe such a contrast - two nations at war on one side of the world, while simultaneously in sporting combat on the other? Odd? Absurd? Ironic? Or maybe rather heartening, providing evidence of the noble power of sport to heal bloody wounds created by headstrong warmongers? Possibly all of these.

But just as we were warming ourselves on the cosy notion that sport - civilised competition between nations - eloquently highlights the aburdity of war, the buckshot began to fly.

The Russian team hissed that the women who beat them may have been Georgian on their passports (handed to them with the blessing of President Saakashvili, whose wife is honorary president of the Georgian Volleyball Federation), but both were born in Brazil. In that sense, they huffed, Russia had not lost to Georgia.

So maybe it's as George Orwell always said: “Serious sport is war minus the shooting.”