The afternoon brought developments in two major running stories that I would characterise as stunning in less surreal times.

First, the Copa América, which is scheduled to start in less than two weeks’ time, was moved abruptly to Brazil. Brazil!

We had just begun to get our heads around this startling piece of information when it was announced that Naomi Osaka, whom many may still be hoping will be one of the faces of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, had withdrawn from the French Open.

My insidethegames colleague Mike Rowbottom has dealt at length with the issues thrown up by the Osaka episode already, so I will concentrate on the Copa.

I don’t know about you, but I had the firm impression that Brazil was unfortunate enough to be one of the countries hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Checking back, I see it is only about 60 days since the reliably level-headed Financial Times headlined an analytical piece "Brazil’s coronavirus nightmare", asserting that "record" death tolls were turning the country into the "global epicentre of the pandemic".

That label may no longer be justified.

However, the Our World in Data website still seems to rank Brazil above the UK, the United States, France, Germany, Peru, even Argentina, which was supposed to host the tournament, by the macabre "cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people" measure.

In terms of daily new confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people, Argentina overtook Brazil on around May 11.

While Brazil’s death rate has been edging down since about April 12, by this same yardstick, it remains far above the main West European countries, the US and India.

The current seven-day daily average in South America’s biggest country is around 1,800 deaths, just over half India’s body count, but between three- and four-times Argentina’s.

In such circumstances, why on earth would Brazilian authorities wish to jump in and take over responsibility for the more than century-old competition at the eleventh hour?

Well, the country is famously football-mad and would, in normal times, almost certainly have greeted the move with delight.

Having staged a World Cup as recently as 2014, it has modern venues.

And, actually, a single-sport competition featuring 28 matches and just 10 teams ought to be far less complicated to make safe, all else being equal, than an Olympic Games featuring men’s and women’s football tournaments alongside 32 - count them - other sports.

Brazil would also be helping out CONMEBOL, the South American regional football confederation, certainly in business terms.

CONMEBOL reported a pre-tax loss of $14.4 million (£10.2 million/€11.8 million) on income of just under $330 million (£233 million/€270 million) last year, when this Copa América was originally scheduled to take place.

For 2021, it has budgeted for income of $487 million (£343.8 million/€398.4million) and expenditure of a shade under $500 million (£353 million/€409 million).

Last but, one suspects, far from least, is the domestic political situation.

Brazil has been led since 2019 by President Jair Bolsonaro, who inhabits the far-right of the political spectrum, whom the FT describes as "one of the world’s leading coronavirus sceptics" and whose name is a tribute to a star Brazilian footballer of the past, Jair da Rosa Pinto.

Bolsonaro, by common consent, could do with a lift.

Richard Lapper, a Latin America specialist at London’s Chatham House, whose book Beef, Bible and Bullets: Brazil in the Age of Bolsonaro has just been published by the Manchester University Press, says that recent opinion polls have shown that a growing number of Brazilians are unhappy about the way Bolsonaro’s Government has handled the COVID-19 crisis.

Last Sunday (May 30), Lapper adds, saw the biggest demonstrations against the President since he took office in January 2019.

To cap it all, the return to politics of left-wing former union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who helped spearhead Rio de Janeiro’s successful bid for the 2016 Olympics and Paralympics, after his conviction for corruption was overturned, leaves Bolsonaro facing a potentially fierce challenge in the next Presidential election in October 2022.

"This is a critical time for Bolsonaro," Lapper concludes.

"Maybe he thinks he can benefit if Brazil does well in the competition."

History would suggest that there is a very good chance of this.

The country’s famously yellow-shirted team has been a perennial power in the global game since the 1950s.

Moreover, since the event was first staged in 1916, the host has emerged victorious on 22 out of 46 occasions.

If one disregards the three tournaments for which there was no designated host between 1975 and 1983, that makes a strike-rate for the Host Nation of better than 50 per cent – an extraordinarily elevated figure.

Indeed, on all five occasions Brazil has hosted the tournament so far, it has won it.

The first of the nine Brazilian victories in all - yes, on home soil - occurred furthermore in 1919 after the prior year’s event had been called off because of disease, in this case flu.

In announcing the venue-switch, CONMEBOL observed how Bolsonaro had "supported the initiative at once, with the endorsement of the Ministries of the Civil House, Health and External Relations, and of the National Sports Secretariat".

According to the Confederation’s President, Alejandro Domínguez, the Brazilian Government had shown agility and decisiveness at "a fundamental moment for South American football".

Early reaction, though, suggests that opposition to the tournament in Brazil will be widespread and intense, and that the move accordingly represents a big political gamble by Bolsonaro.

"It could backfire," Chatham House’s Lapper acknowledges.

In the age of coronavirus, the inextricable link between international sport and politics has never been so graphic.