"I think that it is very important. So that's the mission, and I hope the Olympic Movement will continue working towards that direction. In fact it has become much more important today because we live in a global world, and sport is global. So sport can really bring and make a difference."

You might expect that Bouzou, who competed at four consecutive Summer Games from 1980 to 1992, winning a team bronze with France at Los Angeles 1984 and also taking the individual world title in 1987, would find the old competitive juices beginning to flow whenever he witnesses Olympic sport at first hand.

Joël Bouzou, founder and President of Peace and Sport, pictured at the Forum of 2010 in Monaco ©Getty Images

You would be wrong - although not entirely wrong.

"No, no," he responds, resolutely. "Although when I watch fencing sometimes I am a little bit more involved - physically I feel that. But I really enjoy watching Olympic sport, I enjoy watching the involvement of the athletes, I enjoy looking at the excellence of what they are doing because I think it touches to the absolute of humanity.

"Like an original painter or a great musician, a great athlete is able to reach the summit of humanity. Breaking the world record in the pole vault at 6.16 metres [as his fellow countryman Renaud Lavillenie has just done], that is something which is extreme and which deserves so much respect.

"Looking at figure skating and the beauty of what is done is also touching the humanity at its best. Looking at the fair play and behaviour of some athletes, despite the pressure and sometimes the money which is behind it, is something I really respect.

"It is a passive education which is done by sport itself. You don't need to ask the people to do this or to do that. If they respect the rule at a tournament, then they become better citizens. I have no doubt about that.

Leaders including Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (second left) and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzō Abe (second right) watch the Sochi 2014 Winter Games Opening Ceremony ©Getty Images

"Watching the Olympics is really watching the best of humanity in the spectacle of sport. And that's very interesting. So yes, I really enjoy that. But I am even more interested in looking at how can we use this to create a better world. How can we, day by day, use these values to create a better society?

"I think there is still a lot of work to do on this. And that, for me, is a mission."

Not just a mission, it seems, but a passion.

The Peace and Sport initiative, put simply, seeks to create peace through sport. It sounds like pure idealism - but as Bouzou attests, it is based in science.

As a student of Physical Education in Paris, part of his studies involved looking at data on the subject of sport and its influence on those who take part in it. Bouzou and his fellow students also did some field work in the subject - involving sociograms, which are graphic representations of social links - that has proved to be hugely influential in his thinking.

"We were working on sociograms," he explains. "For example, you take a group and you try to find out who likes whom, and you have a cloud of data after and you can conclude who likes whom, and who is isolated from whom, and who hates whom, and so on.

"And so we did some studies with groups and we used the practice of sport for one or two months together as a team, and we made experiences whereby taking the teams where people were hating each other and putting them together and doing sport for a while, then again when you are making sociograms they have completely changed.

"So the people who are hating each other all are liking each other. These sociagrams were showing that, the power of interaction in sport."

Here, then, were the seeds of the ideas which have since germinated into a global initiative?

"Yes," he responds. "They have always been in my head. The first success for Peace and Sport was to be able to gather together a lot of deciders from Governments and sports to discuss these issues.

"Is sport a solution to set up dialogue between different parts of the international community? We didn't know if people would answer yes to the question of whether they wanted to discuss that. And it happened. And since then it has grown, and the knowledge about this this has grown as well.

"Three years ago we created a Masters in Sustainable Peace through Sport between the University of Monaco and the University for Peace, which was set up in Costa Rica by the United Nations in 1980.

"We did that because we discovered that the people on the ground, when they know peace, they don't know about sport. And when they know sport, they don't know about peace.

"By bringing these two different knowledges together we could create people who had the capacity to run the programmes and sell the programmes and use sport as a tool to do that."

Sport to set Joël Bouzou's pulse racing - fencing at the London 2012 Games ©Getty Images

How, one wonders, does Bouzou feel the most recent Games have fared in terms of promoting the cause of peace?

"That is a big question," he replies. "I think the symbolism of the Olympic Games is still working. I have seen so many athletes and members of delegations in a very happy mood in Sochi.  It was absolutely fantastic.

"I have attended post-competition functions, sometimes unofficial, for example after the two-man bobsleigh won by the Russians with the Americans on the podium. They celebrated after together, and I was there. It was absolutely great and it's a good example of what can sport can establish between people everywhere.

"The US Olympic house hosted a lot of foreign delegations. All of this shows that the Olympic Games are something very, very special and that Olympism is something very, very special and I am very proud to be involved in that.

"With regard to Peace and Sport I have permanently in the head the agenda of peace. I think the Olympics are about this.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (centre) drops into the US House during the Sochi Games ©AFP/Getty Images

"I am very disappointed to see for the moment what is happening in some countries, particularly Ukraine. I really support Sergey Bubka in his position. I observe - and I am not judging, because I am neutral - that Ukraine was one of the countries who signed the Olympic Truce resolution in the UN in November, it was one of the 193 countries who signed that, so it is very difficult to understand what is happening for the moment.

"And so this is something which really shocks me in some ways, but when I see the Olympic Village, the Olympics, the connections between the Olympics and the public, it is really a space for peace and it has to be used, absolutely."

Two years ago at the London Olympics, Bouzou was a high profile commentator voicing his approval of the way in which the table tennis competition had brought together players from both North and South Korea. While the two populations face each other in enmity over a heavily armed border, their representatives were able to do the same in collaboration over the flimsy barrier of a 15 centimetre-high net.

North and South Korean athletes meet across the table tennis table at the London 2012 Games ©AFP/ Getty Images

"There is such a brotherhood between the athletes," Bouzou avers. "I know that in their country they would force dialogue and they can calm down an excited population also. That is what sport can do.

"For example, there are competitions in the past Games if an athlete is meeting an athlete from that nation they withdraw, they don't want, because there is interference of politics in sport. But if you take the two Koreas, when they meet they meet. And it is an example that it is possible, and that it can be peaceful.

"Now organising that at the international level, not only at the Olympics, can be very interesting, especially if some diplomats are joining. Because they have a reason to be together, which is sport, and from that reason maybe they can start a dialogue on other points, and they can start this dialogue without too much interference from the international community and it can be good to have this. Everything we can do to go in that direction I think is interesting and sport is a neutral tool which allows it.

"I would say in any sport, as soon as there is a rule that is respected by both parties, you create immediately the condition for dialogue, and to speak something else around sport. That's the first thing. I think that's very powerful."

Bouzou's involvement in Sochi was primarily as President of the WOA, which has made significant changes in the space of the last few weeks.

"I was in Sochi more from my mission as President of the Olympians," he says. "We had the opportunity to launch there a new website and a new database and a new structure. We hope that through the communication we have put in place concerning all the athletes that they will join.

"How many members have we? Nobody knows how many Olympians are living in the world today because some of them are not connected any more with their NOCs, or with their Sport Ministry.

"But they are Olympians, however, and our ambition is to be so strong in terms of communication that they will join back from all around the world and help create a network of champions who have the capacity to support society and attract the youth towards sport.

"That's our ambition, and there are a lot of Olympians in key positions in society, through their own individual actions. They need to be put together in a network."

Meanwhile, Bouzou and his colleagues within Peace and Sport, which is based in Monaco under the patronage of Prince Albert II, are developing what they hope first and foremost will be a template for others to work upon in future years.

"We are operating in 10 countries for the moment," he says. "But our goal is not to operate everywhere. Our goal is to demonstrate some pilot programmes that solutions exist. Our goal is to convince the Governments that they have to use sport as a solution. And to convince the sports that they can be authorities for peace by using sport sometimes in a directed way. If we do that we grow the performance of the movement, because we grow the actions, but we don't run the actions.

"It is a matter of investing in international sport meetings which help create a bridge for better dialogue between countries. Within a country it is a little bit different - diplomacy has to be applied inside and it is much more difficult I think.

"But a country where sport is very developed is a country which has less social problems. The Russians know very well about this. That's why in 2012 we launched a global programme of social cohesion through sport, and it is running in all the regions in Russia. It was signed in Sochi during the Peace and Sport forum organised there in 2012, and this was a programme started by the Russian Ministry of Sport especially for the use of the difficult suburbs. They started this programme to use sport as a tool for social cohesion.

Joël Bouzou (left) and Peace and Sport patron Prince Albert II of Monaco in 2010 talking to French Polynesian Minister for Sport Jean-Pierre Beaury @Getty Images

"They have their policy on that, and they are planning on scientific studies that were showing that where violence was existing sport solutions were reducing the violence, and so it was very seriously done. And so organising the Sochi Olympics after that is very interesting because you are reinforcing the message inside and I guess that's what they are doing and I hope that it will result in further sport clubs in the future."

The projects operate on the principle of "adapted sport" - in other words, they utilise whatever local customs, resources and facilities are available to encourage populations to come together in sport.

Bouzou quotes as an example the work Peace and Sport have done in East Timor in the wake of its internal conflicts in the struggle to become independent of Indonesia. "In East Timor we have worked on martial arts games," he says. "Now they do martial arts, but they also do sport, and they speak before and after.

"I think that martial arts can be used also in populations where violence is so much a part of things. When you use this kind of sport the violence is qualified by rules. This has been shown to work with hooligans. There are few things they respect, but through martial arts being well presented and organised in the direction of hooligans, to involve them, I think that we can contribute. It has worked in other places."

In December last year, Peace and Sport - in partnership with the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the International Athletics Foundation - arranged an official launch in Bogotá of "Atletismo por la Paz" - Athletics for Peace - which, for at least a year, will involve a programme in more than 20 youth centres across the troubled and crime-ridden land of Colombia.

The goal is to support "the well-being, education and integration" of Colombian youths in underprivileged areas. Instructors from local organisations have been given training in athletics, using local environments and resources to create sporting opportunities, and more generally in life skills for youngsters.

But athletics is only the latest addition to a number of different activities already established in this broad framework with the support of relevant international federations. These include chess, and Frisbee-throwing.

"We have flying discs - Frisbees - in Colombia," Bouzou says. "Can we create Frisbees from local materials? If we have an answer to this, we can implement a solution.

"We do not only have chess in Colombia. In Haiti we developed also chess in refugee camps. Why did we use chess? Because there was no space to do anything else. So if you have no space, what can you do? If you have problems with the climate, what can you do? If you have no resources, what can you do?

"If you have resources which are natural - for example, wood - what can you do? That's why we have created an index where from raw materials you can create basic sports equipment. But then you have to look at is it possible to move around or not? Is there space or not? Is there a tradition or not? Because traditional practices talk to the people.

"If you go to Polynesia, for example, there are a lot of things to be done with traditional boats, and maybe it is not worth to work in swimming pools, but better to work on the sea using the traditional activities, but using that to do something else which is organising activities with a different focus, sometimes gender, any goal we can depending on the problems which we want to concentrate on.

"These are things that can be arranged in refugee camps also. We have not started with refugee camps for the moment, but we are looking at specific approaches for refugee camps - that's one of the goals of this year. We have particular camps in mind, but it is too early to talk about it for the moment.

"But what is a refugee camp? It's a place where people will stay temporarily, but you can see now that there are refugee camps where people have been for 20, 25 years, so it's not something which is temporary. It is a place where poverty is the main feature, and the lack of hygiene, and a lot of problems, and yet there are sports solutions to change a little bit the lives for these people and to bring some rules to kids where there are very few rules which apply."

Refugees in Haiti have benefited recently from the actions of former Olympic 200 and 400m champion Marie-José Pérec, who ran the New York Marathon in November to raise funds for the Peace and Sport project established in the country which was devastated by an earthquake in 2010.

Marie-José Pérec recently ran the New York Marathon to raise funds for Peace and Sport's project in Haiti ©Getty Images

Pérec is one of 70 Champions for Peace, some but not all of whom are Olympians, who have contributed to fund-raising for Peace and Sport.

"Peace and Sport is a global concept," Bouzou said. "It's Forum, for example, is very important because it gathers more than 100 countries together and we have more Foreign Ministers than Sports Ministers.

"But you cannot host a forum and convince people if you cannot demonstrate projects that work. That is also the mission of Peace and Sport Awards, to show what is done. Most of the things are not done by Peace and Sport that gain the awards. Peace and Sport is running projects on the ground to demonstrate that these solutions can be activated. We can go to a larger amount of programmes ourselves, but we cannot act globally ourselves."

That, Bouzou hopes, is a duty which will be taken on by Governments convinced of the benefits of his organisation's model. The core belief is well expressed by the movement's patron, Prince Albert II: "Sport has a unique and irreplaceable capacity to unite people, going far beyond ethnic, religious or social differences. I am convinced that sport can be at the long-term service of peace."

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, covered the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics as chief feature writer for insidethegames, having covered the previous five summer Games, and four winter Games, for The Independent. He has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, The Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. His latest book Foul Play - the Dark Arts of Cheating in Sport (Bloomsbury £12.99) is available at the insidethegames.biz shop. To follow him on Twitter click here.