At the Olympic Games, bullshit and beauty walk hand in hand. The event totters under the weight of portentous symbols; pious talk of world peace and universal love never ceases; politicians and corporations fight and pay for the Olympic zing. But the only Olympic truth is in the action.

When best takes on best, when champion takes on champion, and does so for one of the few prizes in sport that has a scarcity value, we have something that makes profound sense and that possesses a profound beauty.

No matter where you turn in the 16 days of action in an Olympic city, you find yourself watching someone having the most important day of his or her life, the day for which all other days have been preparation, and this is where truth is to be found. It is something I have found utterly compelling in the five Summer Games I have covered for this newspaper.

But the extraneous stuff of torches and flames and vows and dancing children and dreams and doves touches me very little. Opening and closing ceremonies are occasions I try to swerve; seen one vision of world peace, you’ve seen ’em all. I can get bullshit at home. Give me the action, whether it comes from a Tsukahara from a wisp of gymnast, a clean and jerk from a super-heavyweight weightlifter or the passage and piaffe of a mighty dressage horse.

Organisers love the symbols. But the sacred flame, stolen from the gods by Prometheus, relit on Mount Olympus for every Olympiad by the rays of the Sun with the assistance of 11 priestesses in exiguous garments, is something that leaves me cold.

On, then, to the sacred torch relay. This does not go back to Classical times: it was invented to glorify Hitler. It was first used at the Berlin Games of 1936. It took eight days and involved 3,422 runners. There were 86,000 runners for the torch relay that ended in Athens four years ago; there will be 137,000 for the relay that ends in Beijing this summer. They plan to take the torch up Mount Everest; London, even now, will be wondering how to top that.

There are aspects of this that are mildly amusing. The torch has travelled by canoe, on horseback, by Concorde, and even gone underwater at the Great Barrier Reef. The flame in the stadium went out in Montreal at the Games of 1976; someone relit it with a fag-lighter. Now the torch bearing the flame that will eventually light up the stadium in Beijing will come through London next month. It will ride the Docklands Light Railway, among other excitements. It becomes a sitting duck for protesters, a Beijing duck if you like. That is because China is using the Olympic Games for its own self-aggrandisement.

Hitler wanted the Games for exactly the same reason. Mind you, so did Tony Blair, speaking up for the London Games of 2012. The Olympic Games are always about self-aggrandisement but the host nation perpetually thinks we won’t notice, distracted as we are by the eternal flame and the world peace bullshit. In 1980 the Moscow Games were a celebration of the triumph of the Soviet Empire. In 1984 the Los Angeles Games celebrated the triumph of the US-based multinationals. That’s how the Games work.

Greece had all sorts of political and economic things to tell the world when Athens hosted the Games four years ago, but I can’t really remember what they were. Most of us remember the less transient matters: the glory of Kelly Holmes, the impossible victory of Matthew Pinsent, the power of the American swimmer, Michael Phelps, the intensity of the Swedish heptathlete, Carolina Kluft. That’s where beauty lies, and with it truth.

The Olympic Games is both the purest event in sport and the one most overladen with baggage. The torch is part of the baggage. It’s heavy with the most unsubtle kind of symbolism and as such it is a target, perhaps a legitimate one, for those who wish to express reservations about what it represents.

Right now, the Olympic torch represents not peace, not brotherhood, but China, and the contrast between its self-aggrandising Olympic ambitions and its record on human rights. It certainly doesn’t represent sport. But that, at least, will come later.