It's very sad. Something I'm sure many of us suspect or know with varying degrees of consciousness. We would wish that the Olympics uphold those higher ideals, but ultimately, it is a competition. Nobody wants to lose.

Conversely, withholding pupils' school results out of deference to the idea of ethical equal opportunities seems to me faintly ridiculous. Why have the benefits of education and the genuine desire to furnish and improve one's intellect become such a subject of almost a kind of embarrassment?

I remember a lecture I went to in which the lecturer quipped along the lines of: 'In Britain, we have to heap praise on a twelve-year-old just for turning up for classes; in Japan, a twelve-tear-old has to win the Nobel prize first to get a pat on the back'.

I would never advocate a damaging pressure to do well in education either, but this shielding of results in order to accommodate an airy notion of ethics is just silly.