As - much of - the sporting world tries all it knows to leverage the cessation of Russian military activity in Ukraine it is a timely reminder of the beneficial effect sport may have upon politics.

Ping Pong Diplomacy came about from a random human interaction - in accordance, if you like, with the part of chaos theory which is described as the Butterfly Effect, whereby, as I'm sure we all recall, a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

In order to make his theory more easily comprehensible the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz used the image of a seagull’s wings ultimately causing a storm. He then switched to the more poetical notion of a tornado originating in the movement of a butterfly.

On April 4 1971, Glenn Cowan appeared to be a long-haired teenage member of the US table tennis team competing at that year's World Championships in Nagoya - but he was, in historical and geopolitical terms, a butterfly.

At this point in the World Championships the 18-year-old from Culver City, California, like so many athletes before and since, missed his scheduled bus from the arena after training, having been playing for 15 minutes with Chinese player Liang Geliang until a Japanese official arrived to shut the training area.

So Cowan jumped onto another bus - the Chinese bus.

Following the takeover of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, the Cold War with Western nations was still fully frosted.

These Chinese table tennis players were among the first to travel abroad since the Cultural Revolution had happened in their home country five years earlier, but they were forbidden to greet or talk to any foreigners - and least of all Americans.

Despite this, the 30-year-old star player within the Chinese party, Zhuang Zedong - the 1961, 1963 and 1965 world champion who, like his colleagues, had been out of international circulation until the tournament - stepped forward to greet the wayward and shaggy young American who described himself as a hippie.

As Evan Andrews, writing for History, recalls, Zhuang spoke to his new American buddy through an interpreter and presented the teenager with a gift: a silk-screen picture of China's Huangshan mountains.

Cowan wanted to give something back, but all he could find from his bag was a comb. "I can't give you a comb," he said. "I wish I could give you something, but I can't."

But the American returned the gesture the following day by giving Zhuang a t-shirt emblazoned with a peace symbol and the Beatles’ lyric "Let It Be".

Reflecting on this meeting in 2002, Zhuang recalled: "The trip on the bus took 15 minutes, and I hesitated for 10 minutes. I grew up with the slogan 'Down with the American Imperialism!' And during the Cultural Revolution the string of class struggle was tightened unprecedentedly, and I was asking myself, 'Is it okay to have anything to do with your No. 1 enemy?'"

But then Zhuang recalled remembering that, in 1970, Mao Zedong had had a public meeting on National Day with Edgar Snow, the American journalist known for his books and articles on communism in China, and had told Snow that China should now place its hope on American people.

Photographers had caught the exchanges between Cowan and Zhuang on film, and the unexpected goodwill between the US and Chinese teams soon became the talk of the tournament.

Pictures of the two men shaking hands appeared in the Japanese press.

When a journalist asked Cowan, "Mr Cowan, would you like to visit China?", he answered, "Well, I'd like to see any country I haven't seen before - Argentina, Australia, China... any country I haven't seen before." "But what about China in particular? Would you like to go there?" "Of course," said Cowan.

So… what?

One narrative has the Butterfly Effect, the fluttering of two pairs of wings, then others, coming into play. Another analysis involves chance and political expediency.

My colleague David Owen has written in support of the latter theory, citing information contained in Robert Dallek’s book Nixon and Kissinger - Partners in Power which indicates the rapid diplomatic advances that stemmed from this chance encounter were a matter of happy timing.

That is, given that the respective US and Chinese leaders, President Richard Nixon and Mao had each been eyeing the opportunity for a rapprochement.

Nixon was seeking foreign-policy success to distract from the ongoing disaster of the Vietnam War before seeking re-election in 1972. He had made opening China a top priority of his administration, having written in 1967: "We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations."

Mao, meanwhile, was looking for a way to relaunch himself on the international stage.

China’s alliance with the Soviet Union had soured and produced a series of bloody border clashes, and some historians report that Mao believed ties with the Americans might serve as a deterrent against the Russians.

The two sides had already established secret communications channels, and on 11 January 1971 a message to the effect that Nixon would be welcome to visit Beijing was received in Washington via the Romanian Ambassador, according to Dallek.

According to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their biography of the Chinese leader Mao - The Unknown Story, Mao was delighted with Zhuang’s initiative, observing: "Zhang Zedong is not just a good table tennis player, he's a good diplomat as well."

Even so, Mao originally went along with a Foreign Ministry recommendation not to extend to the US players a pre-existing invitation to other foreign teams to come to China immediately after the World Championships.

Owen recalls how a remarkable passage in the book then describes how the 77-year-old leader changed course late one evening after a quiet dinner and a "large dose of sleeping pills".

Drawing on the account of Wu Xu-jun, Mao’s nurse-cum-assistant, the authors describe how after he finished eating, he slumped on the table before mumbling something.

"It took me a long time to work out that he wanted me to telephone the Foreign Ministry," Wu is quoted as saying - "Invite the American team to China".

The quote continues: "I was dumbstruck.

"I thought this is just the opposite of what he had authorised during the day!"

So it was that, as the US team was preparing to leave Nagoya, Mao shocked the world by inviting them to make an all-expenses-paid visit to China.

After checking with their embassy, the American players accepted. "I was as surprised as I was pleased," Nixon later wrote in his memoirs. "I had never expected that the China initiative would come to fruition in the form of a ping-pong team."

The historic visit began on April 10 1971, when 15 American table tennis players, team officials and spouses crossed a bridge from Hong Kong into China.

The US party included Cowan, a pair of high-school-aged girls and a college professor.

None of the players were on a par with the Chinese - the US men's team was ranked 24th in the world at the time - and most had been forced to beg or borrow the money to attend the World Championships in Nagoya, which had run from March 28 to April 7.

Now they were spearheading a unique diplomatic initiative, accompanied by a large press team.

The visitors were given the red-carpet treatment, wined and dined, shown round the tourist sights of Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai.

During one stopover, team president Graham Steenhoven noticed that a "Welcome American Team" banner had been hung over a wall painted with the words "Down With the Yankee Oppressors and Their Running Dogs!"

Meanwhile the players were taking part in a series of exhibition matches held under the slogan "Friendship First and Competition Second".

The Americans were coached by the home players - and allowed to win the occasional game.

"I knew I was not only there to play," Chinese competitor Zheng Minzhi told the New York Times, "but more important, to achieve what cannot be achieved through proper diplomatic channels."

The American trip culminated at Beijing's Great Hall of the People on April 14, when the team had an audience with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, who congratulated the players on opening "a new chapter in the relations of the American and Chinese people."

Cowan, who had caused a media sensation by touring China in a floppy yellow hat and tie-dyed jeans, raised his hand at one point and asked the Premier what he thought of the American hippie movement.

Zhou was momentarily left speechless. "Youth wants to seek the truth and out of this search, various forms of change are bound to come forth," he finally replied. "When we were young it was the same, too."

On the same day that the American players met with Zhou, President Nixon had announced that the US was easing its travel bans and trade embargos against China.

The American and Chinese Governments soon opened new back-channel communications with one another and in July the US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing.

As Owen notes, on April 15 the banner headline in the Daily Mirror, the British newspaper, read "Hello China!".

As well as Nixon’s easing of trade and travel restrictions, there had been a restoration of the direct telephone link between China and Britain "cut off by the Communists when they took over in 1949".

The Mirror story continued: "The US President’s attempts to accelerate the thaw between the Communist giant and the Western world came as America’s table tennis team were being feted in Peking."

The American visitors left China on April 17 and were besieged by reporters upon arrival in Hong Kong after what Time Magazine had called the "ping heard round the world."

The Illustrated London News dated May 1 ran a spread including a photograph of team captain Jack Howard "with Mao’s Red Book at Kennedy airport on the team’s return".

Wherever they went in China, the accompanying text observed, the players were "greeted with unreserved enthusiasm and were allowed to lose only by a narrow face-saving margin when taken on by their much stronger Chinese opponents."

Nixon visited the People's Republic in February 1972, which marked the first time in history that an American president had travelled to the Chinese mainland.

During what Nixon would call "the week that changed the world", he met with Zhou and Mao and took the first steps toward normalising US-Chinese relations with the signing of the Shanghai Communique.

After the "ping" came the "pong". Two months after Nixon’s visit the Chinese were invited to send their table tennis team to the United States for an eight-city tour and Zhuang headed the delegation.

When the Chinese played against a team from the University of Maryland, College Park, Nixon’s daughter, Tricia, was among those in the stands.

Writing about the visit years later, Nixon noted that the Chinese leaders "took particular delight in reminding me that an exchange of ping-pong teams had initiated a breakthrough in our relations.

"They seemed to enjoy the method used to achieve the result almost as much as the result itself."

Mao came out with his own version of the Butterfly Effect, saying: "The little ball moves the big ball."

As Howard told NPR on a return visit to China 35 years later: "We didn’t understand how important it was…

"It really did help improve relations between China and the United States.

"That was the important thing and the lasting thing - and I’m very happy to have been a part of that."

Table tennis had contributed to world peace; and in more recent years it has afforded further examples of Ping Pong Diplomacy, notably in closing the gap between North and South Korea following the war between the two nations from 1950 and 1953 and their subsequent enmity.

At the 1991 World Table Tennis Championships in Chiba in Japan, a unified Korean team played together for the first time since the Korean War.

A similar impromptu initiative achieved the same result at the World Team Table Tennis Championships in May 2018. The two Koreas entered separate teams in the competition but, when they were paired against each other at the quarter-final of the women's event, they negotiated instead to field a joint team for the semi-final.

That initiative was followed through at the International Table Tennis Federation Korean Open in Daejeon, where eight North Korean players took part, with Jang Woo-jin of South Korea and North Korea's Cha Hyo-sim winning the mixed doubles title.

Last year’s World Table Tennis Championships in Houston saw China and the US join forces in the mixed doubles, fielding two teams as Lin Gaoyuan and Wang Manyu of China linked up with Lily Zhang and Kanak Jha of the US, respectively, with Gaoyuan and Zhang earning a bronze medal.

Fifty years on it was another significant re-working of the original Ping Pong Diplomacy pairing.

Would that have happened had Cowan not been such an effervescent and outgoing character, or had Zhuang not decided to break ranks from his reticent colleagues? Who knows…

Cowan, who studied at the University of California, Los Angeles and Santa Monica College before becoming a junior high school teacher, was diagnosed, variously, as being bipolar and schizophrenic.

He died in 2004 aged 52, having been hospitalised for psychiatric treatment and bypass surgery.

Zhuang called from Beijing to express his sympathies. Three years later he travelled over to the US and met Cowan’s mother.

He described the fact that he would never see Cowan again as the greatest regret of his life.