Thus a search for, say, reaction to the anniversary of a 2018 Winter Olympics gold-medal performance can end up with Kim Novak’s recollections of Alfred Hitchcock, followed by a trip out to Wikipedia for a check that leads on to Fred MacMurray and Double Indemnity…

I say "say" but that is what happened on this laptop earlier today. Who knows, there may be a future opportunity to write about Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir. But for now we need to proceed on sporting lines.

Only it's happened again. There I was, scrolling down with professional concentration, poised for Pyeongchang, when I got hit in the eye by a snowball -  a clip of the "psycho throw-in" taken by Paykan’s Nader Mohammedi against Persepolis in the Persian Pro Gulf League.

Perhaps you have seen it already. I found it astounding because - while recognising that this will be very old hat to millions of people already well acquainted with the "flip throw"- it’s new to me.

The player held the ball above his head with both hands, as you would to deliver a traditional football throw-in, but then retained it as he plunged into a forward roll that uses the clutched sphere as a kind of spring-boarding cushion that helped him flip back up and fling it onto the pitch with catapulting power.

In this clip, the somersaulting player releases the ball from within his own half and it carries into the six-yard area of his opponents’ goal. What? What?

One story is that this move was developed by the son of Schellas Hyndman, who coached FC Dallas in Major League Soccer.

"My son Tony started the flip-throw years ago," Hyndman told Big D Soccer in 2013. "He was playing club soccer here and he was 12 years old. Now, his mother is a gymnast, so the boy could do flip-flops all the way across a basketball court. Then, he did [the flip-throw] and as a 12-year-old, he was able to throw the ball 50 yards."

According to Hyndman, opposing coaches were less than pleased with his son's invention and questioned the legality of the play.

"They took it to FIFA," Hyndman said. "FIFA evaluated it and said it follows all the rules of the game: the ball comes from behind [the head], two hands [on the ball], both feet on the ground when you let the ball go."

A comment attached to a re-tweet of the Pro Gulf League example noted: "Tony Pulis needs to see this" - a reference to the former Stoke City manager whose Premier League teams from 2008 to 2013 were noted for their physical approach and the "secret weapon" of Rory Delap’s long throws. These involved no somersaults, but relied upon the innate ability of the Irish midfielder to deliver legal and flat throws a prodigious distance.

The tactic proved particularly testing for Arsène Wenger, whose cultured Arsenal side lost five of out of eight games at Stoke’s Britannia Stadium between 2008 and 2014, with Delap’s long throws contributing substantially to their discomfort.

Pulis later recalled to The Peter Crouch Podcast - hosted by the beanpole forward whom he had signed for Stoke in 2011: "We pulled him to one side and asked him and it turned out he was javelin champion at school. It just went from there. We used it as a wonderful weapon. We stumbled on it.

"When we were using Rory we were getting dogs' abuse. As soon as I saw him throw it I thought, every time we get up the pitch we’ll use that. It’s like having eight or nine extra corners a game.

"Psychologically teams would be affected. We went to West Ham and they had moved the advertising boards in to stop him - so he just threw it from behind the boards. He still hit the middle of the goal."

Delap was a superb exponent of the long throw-in, but by no means it’s innovator. Back in Chelsea’s 1970s heydays, their forward Ian Hutchinson regularly contributed to their cause with huge, windmilling throw-ins, one of which helped set up David Webb’s winning goal in the 1970 FA Cup final replay against Leeds United.

Other innovations were around in football during that era - notably the Coventry City goal against Everton that was lionised when it was broadcast on Match of the Day in 1970, with Ernie Hunt volleying home from a free-kick where the taker, Willie Carr, put the ball between his heels and flipped it up into the air behind him.

That "donkey kick" was outlawed by the Football Association by the end of the season.

Such innovations occur in all sports. In golf, for example, players began in 2011 to adopt what became known as a "belly putter" - which was simply an ordinary putter with a longer handle that allowed a player to press the end of it up into their stomach to provide extra steadiness.

After much discussion and dissent within the game, golf’s governing bodies - The Royal and Ancient Golf Club (R&A) and the US Golf Association - said in 2013 that the practice would become illegal, as from 2016.

At that point it had been used by four of the six previous winners of major championships.

"We recognise this has been a divisive issue, but after thorough consideration, we remain convinced that this is the right decision for golf," R&A chief executive Peter Dawson said.

Perhaps the most famous example of freelance innovation in sport occurred in athletics when a moderately successful college high jumper named Dick Fosbury pioneered a new method of clearing the bar which eventually earned him an Olympic gold medal. Fosbury basically did everything the wrong way round, eschewing the accepted methods of the event in favour of a curved approach run which finished with him clearing the bar backwards.

In a Los Angles Times article of 1989, Fosbury’s high school coach in the early 1960s, Dean Benson, recalled how Fosbury found it hard to master the accepted style of the time, the straddle method, which involved lifting one foot up high and rolling over the bar, head down.

By the end of the 1963 season, Benson told Fosbury to use whatever style he wanted in future. "I won’t say I coached the Flop," Benson said. "We gave Dick the opportunity to try it."

At the next meeting, in Grants Pass, Oregon, Fosbury began by using the old-fashioned scissors method, but morphed into the more comfortable clearance style he had developed in the course of competition, and added four inches to his best height.

The bizarre efforts of this thin Medford High School athlete attracted attention - and a fair degree of ridicule.

Fosbury said he remembered hearing laughter after his lay-back jumps, but he did not mind. "That always helped to psych me up," he said.

His coaches remained unconvinced about his revolutionary method when he moved on to Oregon State University, but Fosbury persisted. At one point doctors warned that such a style was dangerous and would lead to athletes breaking their necks.

But the American Medical Association's sports committee investigated the style and discovered it was no more hazardous than other physical endeavours - particularly when spongier, thicker landing mats became part of the event.

Fosbury entered the Olympic competition against 13 jumpers who had cleared seven feet (2.13 metres) - a height he had never attained - in 1968. But in the course of the event he improved to earn gold with an Olympic record of 2.24m.

"It was startling to a lot of people," said Fosbury, whose innovation has since become the template for all elite male and female high jumping. "They felt I came out of nowhere."

Forty years later in London, at an anniversary dinner marking the 1948 Olympics, Fosbury was invited as a guest, providing the gathering with a characteristically gracious anecdote.

But when the master of ceremonies sought a response from another honoured guest, Dorothy Tyler - who won high jump silver for Britain at the 1936 and 1948 Olympics - it was unexpectedly resonant: "You can't go over the bar head first," said Tyler. "It's cheating."