Between the Commonwealth Games screwing up Glasgow and leeching money from now until 2014, and the Olympics in London in 2012, there's little good news around unless you're a contractor with your snout in one of those troughs.

Not having any real interest them, I suffered a Roger Moore style 'eyebrow rising moment' as I read the story behind the the Olympic Torch, touted as the "Symbol of The Games, their Spirit, the Competition, the Athletes, Sportsmanship,  yada yada yada...", but in reality a symbol of Nazi Germany from 1936, planned with immense care by the Nazi leadership to project the image of the Third Reich as a modern, economically dynamic state with growing international influence.

The organiser of the 1936 Olympics, Carl Diem, wanted an event linking the modern Olympics to the ancient. The idea chimed perfectly with the Nazi belief that classical Greece was an Aryan forerunner of the modern German Reich. The first torch was lit in Greece with the help of mirrors made by the German company Zeiss. Steel-clad magnesium torches to carry the flame were specially produced by the Ruhr-based industrial giant Krupp. Media coverage was masterminded by Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, using the latest techniques and technology. Dramatic regular radio coverage of the torch's progress kept up the excitement, and Leni Riefenstahl filmed it to create powerful images.

In 1936 the torch made its way from Greece to Berlin through countries in south-eastern and central Europe where the Nazis were especially keen to enhance their influence. "Sporting chivalrous contest," Hitler declared just before the torch was lit, "helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore may the Olympic flame never expire." The flame's arrival in Vienna prompted major pro-Nazi demonstrations, helping pave the way for the Anschluss, or annexation of Austria, in 1938. In Hungary gypsy musicians who serenaded the flame faced within a few years deportation to Nazi death camps. Other countries on the relay route like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia would soon be invaded by Germans equipped not with Krupp torches but with Krupp munitions. And Carl Diem, the relay's inventor, ended the war as fanatical military commander at the Olympic stadium in Berlin, refusing to accept that the Third Reich was over. Hundreds of the youngsters were killed in a futile attempt to defend the stadium. Diem however survived, and reinvented himself after the war as an academic specialising in the philosophy of sport.

One Olympic Torch Relay Runner was Siegfried Eifrig, who carried the torch as it arrived in the centre of Berlin. Flanked by huge swastika flags, he lit a fire on an altar - typical of the pseudo-religious symbolism Nazism relished. Eifrig is still alive, aged 98, and still has the original Krupp torch, engraved with the route of the 1936 relay. He says he is saddened by the controversy this year's relay has attracted, as it ought to be kept a "purely sporting" affair, and he is also critical of the way the politicians, as ever, have sought to exploit it, and sees the plan to take the torch across the summit of Mount Everest as a "pointless gesture" that makes a nonsense of the relay as an athletic challenge. Having survived the war as a soldier and then aas British PoWr, he now sees the 1936 relay in a more sober light than when he was one of its stars.

It's all rather different from the image promoted by the media and sponsors today, but then again, they have to something important today. like make a profit from it, not achieve something trivial like trying to take over the world.