Such questions flitted through my mind at a press conference in Central London that announced Great Britain’s first ever women’s team in sumo wrestling, an ancient discipline that demands balance, strength and composure, but also happens to involve leotards, physical grappling and oodles of exposed flesh.

When I asked Adele Jones, who has a medal chance at this week’s World Championships, how she felt about the physical intimacy and corpulence of her sport, I was somewhat taken aback by the ferocity of the response. “I do not regard sumo as intimate at all,” she said. And later: “Anybody who thinks that sumo has anything to do with sex completely misunderstands the nature of the sport.” But do they?

I ask the question because it has become de rigueur to pretend that sex and sport have nothing to do with each other. When, for example, Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, said that women’s football would command greater audiences if the participants wore skimpier clothing, he was ferociously criticised, not only because his assertion was undeniably true but because he had broken one of sport’s last remaining taboos.

Blatter’s detractors argued that his comments “objectified” women footballers in a way that demeaned their sporting professionalism. But does this argument not contain a hefty dose of hypocrisy? Can it really have escaped the notice of his critics that other sporting institutions have traded upon female sexuality for years without its superstars being taken any less seriously?

Hemlines in tennis have been going north so rapidly that they have started to suffer vertigo. Sartorial modesty is actually prohibited in beach volleyball. And can all that body-hugging, liquid Lycra typically worn in athletics simply be about aerodynamics? Blatter’s crime, it would seem, was merely to give voice to something that many would prefer to remain conveniently subliminal.

Sport is, at least partly, a celebration of the human body so it would be curious if sexuality played no part in the way it is perceived by participants and spectators. This is not to say that sex is uppermost in the mind when watching, say, Wimbledon (or sumo) but merely to state that it is one aspect of sporting theatre. Could anyone seriously contend that sport would be unchanged in any meaningful way if it were contested by androgynous athletes?

This argument applies equally to men’s sport. Only a fool would argue that the square-jawed, muscle-limbed masculinity of rugby players has nothing to do with the sport’s popularity among women. But does this mean that rugby exploits its athletes when it uses rugged imagery to promote the sport? Was Kevin Pietersen exploited when he was used to promote last summer’s Ashes at a time when it was far from certain that he would make the team?

In his latest book, The Meaning of Sport, Simon Barnes, the Chief Sports Writer of The Times, writes about sporting metaphor. Football, he says, is a cod battle, tennis a cod duel. But does Barnes not miss a trick by failing to note the sexual symbolism implicit in sporting endeavour?

When eight men swagger to their marks for a 100 metres showdown is not the sexual pageantry every bit as blatant as when peacocks parade their plumage? When two footballers square up on the pitch is it not evocative of lions vying for alpha supremacy? Those who have never experienced the aphrodisiac of sporting conquest — something that has been scientifically measured as a surge of testosterone — understand little of the masculine sporting psyche.

One of the fears of those who seek to segregate sport and sex is that there is a fine line between the avowal of sexuality and the descent into pornography. We do not play sport to titillate or watch sport to be titillated. The emotions inspired are far grander and more textured than that. But, as advertisers have understood for generations, sexuality permeates the way we all perceive the world. Can we not acknowledge this without it becoming a recipe for leering?

Future anthropologists will regard contemporary sport (as we regard many of the physical rituals of former civilisations) as a partly sexual phenomenon. But perhaps it is naive to suppose that we are yet mature enough to recognise this without fans and athletes feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

Sex is a part of life. It is our own neurosis that prevents us from acknowledging that it is also a part of sport.