Is this an example of a pampered star shunning the Olympic ethic? Or is it simply a sensible move for someone intent on seeking the optimum state of preparation for defending his Olympic tennis title?

In announcing his decision during the Madrid Masters event, Murray has effectively allied himself with 14-times Grand Slam champion Roger Federer, who has also indicated he will be staying outside the Village in Rio. (Although Rafael Nadal, who won the Beijing 2008 title from the base of the Olympic Village, will follow the same pattern in 2016).

The US men’s and women’s basketball teams, meanwhile, will be staying on a cruise ship in the port of Rio de Janeiro for the duration of the Olympics.

The reasoning behind these decisions is not hard to fathom.

The basketball players made their announcement last month, citing the wish to ensure “maximum security” and to allow players to spend time with their families.

Federer is reportedly wary of encountering the same issues which dogged him when he stayed in the Olympic Village at Beijing 2008, part of which were repeated requests for autographs and photos.

Murray, who also stayed in the Village during Beijing 2008, had the following explanation for opting to stay in an apartment in Rio de Janeiro with the rest of the British tennis team: “My job there is to try to prepare as best I can and win a medal for my country. I think the best way to do that is to sort of prepare like you do for other events where you’re in your own space.”

While this quest for the best may be all well and good for such elite sporting protagonists, for the Brazilian organisers it is, frankly, a nightmare.

A senior Brazilian security official last month encouraged all athletes to stay at the Olympic Village to avoid having to draw up additional security measures for certain individuals, at a time when the security budget had been cut by nearly $500 million (£345 million/€438 million).

The question of athletes giving the Olympic Village a swerve received probably its highest profile airing ahead of the 1984 Los Angeles Games when home athlete Carl Lewis, who would go on to win the four gold medals predicted for him, was quite open about the fact that he wanted to spend as little time as he could in the Olympic Village at the University of Southern California.

''I'm going to try to stay away as much as possible,'' Lewis said after making a brief visit to the Village in the run-up to the Opening Ceremony. ''I'm a visible athlete, as I found out there. My goal is to compete as well as I can and that means I have to get my privacy.''

In fairness, Lewis was not the only US athlete who decided to live and train outside the Village during those Games, but his abilities deemed it inevitable that he would be a focus of attention.

The decision didn’t appear to go down too well with US team-mate Tonie Campbell, the 110 metres hurdler, who would go on to finish fifth in the final.

Without mentioning Lewis by name, Campbell said: ''We are no longer competing as individuals but as a team. We're here to help each other out and psych one another up. We all had the post-Olympic Trials blues. We were so mentally exhausted. And now, we have to help each other build ourselves up.''

However it went down with his team-mates, the decision worked for Lewis, and four years later in Seoul he played things the same way. After being constantly mobbed by autograph hunters and photographers at the US training camp in Chiba, Japan, he felt obliged to fly under an assumed name, switch his travel plans, and to move into a townhouse in a suburb of the city.

Well, Lewis left South Korea with two more gold medals and a silver, so something worked. But for all his multiplicity of medals, had the fabled sprinter and long jumper not missed out on something vital to the essence of the modern Games, as their effective founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, had envisaged them?

Justifying his decision over Rio 2016, Murray added: “It’s different than what we’re used to. I think that’s why the players are staying outside.”

And there, right there, is where he could be missing out in the same way that Lewis did. At least, according to Canadian academic Bruce Kidd, of the University of Toronto.

In his 1997 paper entitled Psychological aspects of the experiences of athletes at the Olympic Villages: issues and challenges, part of an International Symposium on Olympism held in Lausanne that year, Kidd argues that the Olympic Village offers contradictory problems for its would-be guests.

On the one hand, there is the concern that sleep, routine and hence performance will be adversely affected by the social distractions of the Village.

This seems a good moment to remind you that, for the last Olympics in Sochi, 100,000 free condoms were provided by the organisers for the 6,000 athletes in attendance – an average of around 16 condoms per athlete. Of course, it may have worked out differently. Maybe only 1,000 athletes made full use of the facilities. 1,000 very sluggish athletes, one would imagine…

But we digress. The other hand awaits us, and in it is clenched the contradictory difficulty. For if athletes avoid or shun the Village for fear of what it might do to their preparations – or what they might find themselves doing instead of preparing – they risk missing out on one of the fundamental aspects of Coubertin’s Olympic vision, namely the opportunity to understand other peoples of the world in a dynamic intended to deepen mutual experience and knowledge and, ultimately, to diminish the likelihood of force being used to settle international conflicts.

Kidd points out that the very thing coaches will seek to do to maximise their athletes’ performances abroad, namely to strive to re-create the conditions of the home country - Sir Alf  Ramsey making sure his England boys had all the fish fingers they needed at the 1970 FIFA World Cup finals in Mexico comes to mind for some reason - is the very thing that will deprive those athletes of the cultural experience which should be their due.

So even if Murray retains his title at Rio 2016, or Federer wins his first individual gold, both men could also be seen as losers in the grand scheme of things.

I expect they would manage to get over it though.