Make no mistake, the past seven days mark a watershed in modern sport. It is not only that more than 200 athletes have signed up to a petition condemning China’s inadequate response to the crisis in Darfur or that the British Olympic Association (BOA) was widely castigated for drafting (and subsequently withdrawing) a contract that banned its competitors from “commenting on politically sensitive issues” at the Olympic Games in Beijing.

No, the real revolution lies in the germ of an idea – expressed by a growing number of sportsmen in recent days – that democracy is about rather more than casting a vote in the privacy of the polling booth. As Richard Vaughan, a British badminton player who signed the petition on Darfur, put it: “Trying to bully athletes into not saying things is not the right way. It’s very tough to keep a polite silence about a conflict that continues to cost so many lives.” Sportsmen, it seems, are rediscovering their appetite to engage in the world beyond the field of play.

It is a development as surprising as it is exhilarating. Decades of self-censorship have culminated in figures such as Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, men who have come to symbolise a new and crushing form of political apathy. Jordan was once asked to endorse the campaign to unseat Jesse Helms, a Republican Senator who once helped to draft a campaign slogan that read: “White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories?”). The basketball player, whose fortune was built on his relationship with Nike, responded with the memorable one-liner: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

Woods has also proved adept at swerving any issue that might impact upon the sanitised image of his corporate clients. A clearly thoughtful person, he has nevertheless managed to turn his press conferences into masterclasses of blandness that drain the soul. Those of us who are paid to interview such icons – and the dozens who aspire to be like them – have long been accustomed to the suited PR man in the corner, poised to thwart any question that strays beyond the customary banalities. That this Orwellian censorship is under threat from a new generation of athletes is as invigorating as it is salutary.

Of course, some will argue that sportspeople ought to stick to what they know best – and anyone who has listened to Buster Mottram, the former British tennis No 1 and one-time supporter of the National Front, will doubtless have some sympathy with that view. But this is not about forcing sportsmen to talk about political issues or pretending that they will always know what they are talking about when they do.

Rather, it is about allowing – indeed encouraging – each of us to engage in the wider political process, whether it be delivering leaflets, joining a march on Westminster or using a press conference at the Olympic Games to berate the Chinese Government for selling arms to the Sudanese regime that have been used in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of tribesmen in that devastated country – as Joey Cheek, the American speed skater who started the petition on Darfur, did after winning gold at the Winter Olympics in Turin in 2006.

Cheek understands, as so many others do not, that democracy will be imperilled as soon as the idea takes hold that politics is the exclusive preserve of professional politicians. Sure, we will doubtless disagree with much of what sportsmen say about politics, in the same way that we disagree with much of what politicians say about politics. But, for heaven’s sake, let us have a free market in ideas rather than the political censorship and cultural homogeneity that has come to define the new world of global capital.

We should never forget that sportsmen – today so puny and impotent – were once pivotal in the process of social and political transformation. Muhammad Ali, in his atavistic rages against the treatment of black Americans, animated an entire political movement and helped to transform the timetable of racial change. Billie Jean King, another firebrand who refused to be deterred by the forces of conservatism, radicalised a generation of women with her “Battle of the Sexes” victory over Bobby Riggs in 1973. Other names such as Tommie Smith and John Carlos will forever be writ large in the dramatic history of the 20th century.

We have long been accustomed to political activism from those in the entertainment industry and other areas of public life, so few people were surprised by the interventions of Steven Spielberg or Mia Farrow this week, both of whom dared to express their views on Darfur. (Spielberg withdrew from his artistic involvement with the Beijing Olympics yesterday on political grounds.)

Whether athletes’ newfound political self-confidence will last beyond the thrilling flurry of recent days will be determined, at least in part, by the ability of Cheek, Vaughan and others to make a noise in Beijing in the teeth of resistance from the Chinese Government and the paranoia of organisations such as the International Olympic Committee and the BOA. Any attempt to gag these athletes should be exposed and resisted. It is time to put sport back into politics.