The long-running debate on whether to have sex before sport was reopened last week when the India cricket squad were told that pre-match love-making was good for them. “Go ahead and indulge,” Paddy Upton, the team’s mental conditioning coach, said, sounding rather like a parent giving the kids carte blanche to lash open the pressies on Christmas morning.

Upton’s words unleashed an orgy of discussion in cyberspace, sex being one of the few subjects on which all of us think we are expert. One karate professional, who competed in savage round-robin tournaments at Madison Square Garden in New York, posted on The Times’s website to say: “Sex before the fights was a lot better than after.”

David, another reader, posted: “I believe that the key to this debate is moderation. A sexual encounter with your spouse or girlfriend before a game is OK if it’s not preceded by partying or drinking.” To which Eugene replied: “Why ‘or’?”, by which he meant, I think, that if sex is something to be legitimately indulged in before a match, then why not go the whole hog and have a threesome with the wife and girlfriend.

Eugene was doubtless being facetious, but he makes a telling point. The question of whether sex before sport is a good or bad thing makes no allowance for variety. A full-scale, Max Mosley-style S & M orgy is clearly not the optimal way to prepare for the London Marathon, but it could be — and I am speculating here — an ideal means of getting in the mood for a game of snooker (or, indeed, the annual meeting of the FIA).

To put it another way, the question of whether sex is good for sport can only be answered if we first clarify the question of what kind of sex before what kind of sport. And, unless I have missed it, none of the academic surveys (and there are quite a few milling about) has bothered fully to trace the causal relationships that exist across the spectrum of these two, very different forms of physical interaction. Is missionary, for example, good before motor sport? Swinging before soccer?

But before getting entrapped in these admittedly intriguing details, there is, I suggest, an even more fundamental problem with this debate. The question of whether sex is good for sport implies that sex is subservient to sport; that sex is, in some sense, a means to a sporting end. It offers the idea that sport is the be-all and end-all and that sex is — rather like the warm-up and the pre-competition pep talk — a mere form of preparation.

But, without wanting to get all Darwinian on you, I would suggest that this analysis wholly inverts the relevant logic. Sex is surely the end, not the means. It is the thing that drives us and strikes fear into us. The thing that obsesses and represses us. It is the wellspring from which most (Freud would say all) of our most primal desires and anxieties leap.

The smart question, therefore, is not “is sex good for sport?” but rather, “is sport good for sex?" And, more particularly: “Is being good at sport something that is likely to get you more — or better — sex?”

The pat answer to this, of course, is a resounding “yes”. Countless PhD theses have been written detailing the allegorical significance of sporting conquest: how triumphing in these contrived duels is a demonstration of alpha qualities — virility, strength and the like; attributes that are deeply implicated in what biologists call “reproductive value”. Some may even argue that sport’s entire appeal is metaphorical; that it is an invented world in which the Darwinian struggle is played out graphically before our eyes, wrapped in a veneer (often wafer-thin) of civility. It is, if you like, the human equivalent of peacocks strutting or deer rutting.

In his endlessly wise The Meaning of Sport, Simon Barnes, the chief sports writer of this paper, drives home the point, arguing that sport’s meaning is to be found deep in our evolutionary past: “Sport goes deeper than the mere human in us. Sport goes to the heart of our mammalian selves. No wonder sport transcends cultural boundaries; no wonder sport brings 202 nations together at the Olympic Games.”

Anyone who has been fortunate enough to have been resident in the Olympic Village will discern more than a grain of truth in these Darwinian speculations. At my first Games, in Barcelona in 1992, I was fascinated to see that the chaps who won gold medals — even geeky types — were the principal objects of desire for many female athletes.

As I wrote at the time of the Beijing Games last year: “There is something about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy — smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a sure-fire ticket to writhe.”

But while this is true, as far as it goes, the nuances are, in many ways, even more interesting than the basic observation. Winning gold in the 100 metres, for example — and I am sure you will agree with me on this — has far greater sexual significance than winning gold in fencing. I make this point not to demean fencing, but to illustrate that there is more to the relationship between sex and sport than merely winning: it matters in what sport you win.

As a table tennis player, this is an observation that is perilously close to my heart. Long ago I discovered (to my sizeable chagrin) that being the nation’s top player was not a sure-fire ticket to writhe or, indeed, anything else. “Ping pong”, females would giggle affectionately when I told them my job. “Can you really do that professionally?” Is it any wonder that minority sportsmen are so chippy?

Some will doubtless argue that money is the underlying driver in all this, that if ping pong paid more than football, the attractiveness of its top players would be that much greater. But this, it seems to me, is to take a reductionist step too far.

Rugby pays less than football, but rugby players are the men of choice in southwest London. And, in case you were wondering, table tennis pays far less than football in China, but it is ping pong players who remain the pin-up boys in the bars and clubs of downtown Beijing.

All of which hints at the fact that what is ultimately driving the dynamic between sex and sport is a complex interaction between success (the alpha male effect) and culture — a point that hit home with striking force during my stay in New York last week. Why? Because table tennis has, against all expectations, and in a counter-cultural phenomenon of almost transgressive dimensions, become the hippest thing among the Manhattan glitterati.

Down on the corner of Park Avenue and East 23rd Street, a new nightclub has opened offering not a dancefloor, but row upon row of ping pong tables. To a thumping beat of house and dance music, the cream of New York’s intelligentsia whack balls while sipping fizzing Bellinis. Spin is the name of the establishment — the brainchild of a trio of thrusting film producers — and it opened a couple of months ago to rave reviews in the glossies.

You will not be surprised to hear that I paid the establishment a visit on Friday night and revelled in being introduced to the crowd and strutting my stuff in an exhibition match with the resident hot shot before sharing cocktails with Susan Sarandon, the actress, and a posse of wannabe models. For 30 minutes I felt like David Beckham. Never before have I glimpsed so vividly the correlation between a good forehand and a jolly good shag.