Antipathy, anger and enmity may be a world away from the kind of end-product Baron Pierre de Coubertin had in mind when he, to use current parlance, executed his vision of an Olympic Games. But there’s no mistaking them - and they are compelling.

Any sports follower will have their own internal file of examples which, like it or not, get them going.

This one, off the top of his head, is recalling the death stare of Manchester United’s Roy Keane as he leans over the shoulder of referee Graham Poll to confront Arsenal’s rival totem Patrick Vieira in the tunnel at Highbury before their crucial Premier League meeting in 2005, repeating the words: "I’ll see you out there!"

Flashback to the Toronto SkyDome in 1997 for the self-styled Challenge of Champions - Canada’s newly established Olympic 100 metres champion Donovan Bailey versus the Olympic 200 and 400m champion Michael Johnson of the United States over the compromise distance of 150 metres, for $1million prize money in front of a 25,000 crowd.

Bailey claimed the prize after Johnson had pulled up at the halfway point clutching his left thigh. 

The Canadian, who had bridled at Johnson’s appropriating the term "world’s fastest man" for himself when that distinction lay traditionally with the Olympic 100m champion, flatly announced that his opponent was "a faker and a chicken."

Offered the chance a little later in the evening to amend or retract his comments, the former marketing and property consultant considered for a moment before a familiar gleam came into his eye and responded: "He's called me a lot of things so, no, I don't regret saying it…"

Flashback to golf’s 1999 Ryder Cup, held at the Brookline Country Club in Massachusetts, where Justin Leonard, playing in his final day singles match against Europe’s Jose Maria Olazabal, had the opportunity of securing the trophy for the home nation either by winning or halving the match.

The two men were level at the seventeenth green, but the odds seemed in Olazábal’s favour as his ball was only about twenty-five feet from the hole, whereas the American’s had drifted to almost twice that distance away. 

Leonard putted first, however, and when the ball travelled all the way into the hole there was an uproar of jubilation around the green, with US players and their wives cavorting in premature triumph.

What seemed to have been forgotten in all this was that Olazábal had yet to attempt a putt which, had it gone in, would have halved the hole and at least given him an opportunity to try and deny Leonard and the host team by winning the eighteenth.

Amidst the bedlam, he missed. The bedlam redoubled.

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play," George Orwell wrote in December 1945. 

"It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting."

That well known quote comes from his essay "The Sporting Spirit", originally published in Tribune magazine. 

What prompted Orwell to write on this topic was the tour of Britain that had just been undertaken by the Russian football league champions Dynamo Moscow, who, in an arrangement made as a gesture of solidarity while the Second World War was still being fought, played against Chelsea, Cardiff City, Rangers and a quasi-Arsenal side. 

"Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived," Orwell says at the start of his essay. 

"That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before."

Orwell reports that the Glasgow match was "a free-for-all from the start" and recalls that at the Arsenal game a British and a Russian player came to blows and the referee was booed. 

He adds: "I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations…international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred." 

Bearing such statements in mind, the Unpleasantness at Wimbledon’s Centre Court that took place this weekend, involving Stefanos Tsitsipas and Nick Kyrgios of Australia, while it may still have SW19 abuzz, came lower down the scale. 

But nobody who was watching it will forget the methods employed by the Australian or the furious reactions of his Greek opponent.

It has long been a feature of the controversial Kyrgios’s game that he will, when the mood takes him, unsettle his opponent with an underhand serve which, while it may sound illegal, is not.

That said, when it is casually flicked over the net from between the legs, as it was when Kyrgios served to level at 3-3 in the opening set - with his artfully weak effort causing the flustered Greek to net the return - it might as well have been a V-sign.

And when, after Kyrgios had drawn level at a set-all, Tsitsipas cracked, and smashed a ball dangerously into the crowd, his opponent was effectively in control of a match he went on to win - that is, after his urgent suggestion that Tsitsipas should be defaulted for his wild display had been turned down by the beleaguered umpire.

"If he’s affected by that today, then that’s what’s holding him back,” Kyrgios told reporters afterwards.

"Because someone can just do that and that’s going to throw him off his game like that. I just think it’s soft."

Irksome as many may have found it, the Australian was perfectly embodying Stephen Potter’s timeless, tongue-in-cheek Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating.