On the one hand - much as some of the shriller voices of criticism might wish it - it simply is not possible for a construct as insignificant as a sports body to make any headway by trying to throw its weight around with the Chinese Communist Party, long-time ruler of a nuclear-armed state, except perhaps within the narrow confines of the Olympic project.

On the other, if Lausanne decided even at this late stage to take its toys away and put on the Games somewhere else (it won’t - not least because the only ready-to-rumble single-site alternative may be Sochi), I imagine they might well find themselves sued for breach of contract.

So, I would say they are stuck, painted into a corner, able to do little more than accentuate the positives, such as China’s active vaccine diplomacy - a recent article by Yanzhong Huang in the journal Foreign Affairs flags up a Chinese Foreign Ministry claim to be providing free vaccines to 69 countries while exporting commercially to 28 more - while trusting that President Xi Jinping will see fit to dial down the aggression in the last few months before the Games.

Meanwhile, if this week’s New York Times piece by Mitt Romney, the former United States Presidential election candidate and head of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games Organising Committee, entitled The Right Way to Boycott the Beijing Olympics, is any guide, they may have to brace themselves for a sustained period of trial by op-ed.

One should not underestimate the damage this could do.

As spelt out in the shiny new strategy document Agenda 2020+5, the IOC "continues to provide a very attractive proposition to commercial partners thanks to the Olympic values…

"We know this brand association continues to be a valuable component and a driving element behind leading global companies’ desire to be associated with us."

It follows that tarnishing this image by, oh I don’t know, embarking on partnerships with regimes whose reputations around the world are dented could have real commercial consequences for the IOC.

Another uncomfortable development for Lausanne in this context is that Xi and his party machine appear to have declared war in recent months on the IOC’s most significant Chinese commercial partner.

In what might be interpreted as the latest blow struck in this apparent trial of strength, the Financial Times reported this week that Chinese internet companies had pulled an internet browser associated with the IOC worldwide sponsor Alibaba from their app stores.

This came, according to the FT, "a day after a Communist party leadership meeting chaired by the President issued an unusually blunt warning to the country’s tech sector over its growing size and influence."

Alibaba is arguably the IOC’s most important commercial partner of all at present, because of its input both in efforts to redesign and modernise Olympic ticketing, and to transform the back-end of the Olympic broadcasting process through application of its cloud technology.

"We want to drive actively the transformation, a new way of running the Games," is how a key Alibaba executive explained it to me when I sat down with him in Lausanne a year or so ago.

It is probably worth reminding ourselves how the IOC got into this mess.

Had it shown more flexibility in 2014 towards the questions and concerns of Norwegians, we might have been preparing to head next February for Oslo - capital city of a country that is not only diplomatically blameless, but has won more Winter Olympic medals than any other, in spite of its population of less than six million.

To be fair, while I watched developments from a distance, I am not convinced that Norwegian politicians of the day would ever have agreed to keep Oslo 2022 going.

Once the Norwegian capital had pulled out though, the IOC was left with a choice of only Beijing and the Kazakhstan city of Almaty.

I am led to believe that the Kazakh city would in many ways have been a delightful host, but I suspect that the IOC would have had to work a lot harder to make sure all the venues and myriad other details that go into preparing an Olympic Games were ready.

Whatever other issues there may be, you just knew China would score A1 for technical preparations.

It is also fair to say that relations between the West and China were a great deal better in 2015, when Beijing 2022 won the race by the skin of its teeth, than is the case today.

The China story in Europe and North America at that time was still focused primarily on skyrocketing trade and its potential for mutual enrichment.

The stunning and sustained economic growth which, allied to Xi’s growing assertiveness, has riveted attention on the Chinese threat to US global hegemony, was not axiomatic.

Indeed, I find it little short of astonishing that Chinese gross domestic product has more than tripled in size since 2008, when modern China announced itself to the world by staging a memorable Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Nor would it have been straightforward to foresee the traction that the Uyghur cause has gained in recent times - current tensions over Hong Kong, Tibet and Taiwan were, by contrast, much more predictable.

As they batten down the hatches and assume defensive formation ahead of what may be a fairly torrid few months on the China front, the IOC and its public relations hoplites may nevertheless draw succour from at least three sources of consolation.

First, the issue, as far as the IOC is concerned, is finite: by this time next year their China crisis should be behind them.

Second, most current sponsors of the Olympic Movement will, first and foremost, be grateful for an opportunity to showcase their brands in a major, major market.

It is perhaps an extreme example, but the importance of China to one sector which has become an absolute mainstay of sports sponsorship in recent decades - the watch industry - was highlighted to me a few months ago by a single sentence in an update from the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry.

This read simply: "Exports to China leapt by 78.7 per cent in September and fell sharply almost everywhere else."

Third, Beijing 2022 may well be instrumental in kick-starting an important new market for the winter sports industry.

I am no expert on this, and it is fair to say I have detected a degree of scepticism.

A gentleman called Mark Dreyer who covers the Chinese sports industry this month published a Twitter thread purporting to cover all mentions of sport in a recent Chinese Government Work Report as well as a National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) plan.

Among the mentions highlighted was this: "Encourage the participation of at least 300 million people in winter sports."

Dreyer’s comment: "The big man threw the 300 million line out there back in 2015 as a way to entice the IOC to give Beijing the Winter Olympics - and it worked, so they’re sticking with it.

"But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

"Of course, we’ve seen with China numbers that there is a lot of flexibility of interpretation - "participate" could mean "watch the Olympics on TV."

To which I would simply add a) that I doubt that this 300 million number would need to be attained, or anything like it, for winter sports executives to regard the whole exercise as a success, and b) it seems reasonable to expect a bit of a surge, even if I suspect it might prove, for the most part, short-lived.