Wednesday, 14 April 2021 I often feel queasy when sports leaders claim some higher purpose for the activities over which they preside. As if games that are responsible for so much simple human happiness require any further justification. Not that sport is incapable of doing good in a broader sense: as a universal idiom, a vehicle for building bridges between people of profoundly different backgrounds, nothing else comes close. But sport’s power to change the world usually seems most convincing when activated by something spontaneous, rather than a premeditated, top-down brand-building exercise. A particularly good example of this occurred in Nagoya, Japan exactly half a century ago.