Due to the ace reporting skills of Pausanias, we know that all was not pure at the ancient Olympics, even in the very, very ancient of days. He named Eupolos of Thessaly as the first recorded wrongdoer in the history of the Games - guilty of bribing boxers in the 98^th Olympiad.

The news was hardly hot off the press as Pausanias was writing in the second century AD.

But anyway. Rather than launching into an extended discussion about foul play I want to focus on the nakedness. That is, the concept of the nakedness.

Neither Pausanias nor any of his fellow Olympic scribes down the years mentions whether athletes of ancient times felt odd about having to do everything in the buff.

Nor indeed is there any mention of whether any of the Greeks involved found the nakedness of their opponents a distraction - or indeed an attraction.

What we do know is that there were, officially at least, no women around to be viewing the athletes as objects of desire.

Pausanias wrote that women were banned from Olympia during the Games under penalty of death. But he also said that the penalty had never been carried out, and his account added, rather puzzlingly to commentators down the ages, that only married women were barred. One line of thought on this is that a scribe somewhere along the line misunderstood or miscopied what was written.

Whatever. The ancient Olympians - they had no clothes on. Up to a point that could simply be because none of them wanted to compete in full armour or togas or whatever.

Now to be sure there are some sports that require one to wear more than one normally might. American football, say. Or fencing. But most other sports require one to wear less. This is - usually - a practical consideration.

In more recent years, however, sportswear has become more of a matter of choice for many, clothing that moves with the tides of trends. The distinguished former Australian rugby union player Michael Lynagh recently recalled in The Times  the somewhat mocking comments of his children upon watching old clips of him playing in the 1990s.

They noted the "slow" pace of play - and the shortness of the players’ shorts.

While the young Lynaghs saw the parade of short shorts as a bit of a joke, there may have been others - female or male - who got a bit more interested in it for other reasons. Such is human life.

It is impossible to make sport a sex-free zone, in the sense that human physical attraction is entirely annulled. You can’t annul human feeling.

While one person might see a footballer leaping like a salmon at the far post, another might see a vision of physical beauty in full expression. You can’t separate sex and sport any more than you can separate politics and sport.

But times, and mores, change.

A few nights ago - and let no-one say I don’t know how to live - I watched a full replay of the 1964 FA Cup final won by my favoured team, West Ham United, at Wembley, as broadcast by BBC TV.

At a couple of points when the ball went out the camera moved to photographers sitting to the side of one of the goals as if they were having a picnic, and one of them was a young blonde woman.

Much was made of the presence of this young woman by the commentator, Kenneth Wolstenholme, and while his comments in 1964 would probably have been described as gallant, in 2021 they jar as patronising.

I am certainly not having a go at the commentator here. Times and customs change, and I am sure all of us of a certain age have said and done things in the past that are deemed naff or worse nowadays.

Other examples suggests themselves. When British athletes Linford Christie and Sally Gunnell won Olympic gold medals at the 1992 Barcelona Games in the men’s 100 metres and women’s 400m hurdles, respectively, The Sun newspaper, as I recall, marked the occasion in a way that was iffy then, and looks worse now.

Much was made of Linford’s "lunchbox", as evidenced by Lycra shorts that were the fashion then for many and didn’t leave too much to the imagination. And when Gunnell, from Chigwell, held off her gaudy US rival Sandra-Farmer Patrick for victory, the paper’s headline was: "Essex girls DO come first!"

Christie, rightly, objected. Some thought he was just being shirty. What Gunnell thought of it I don’t know. Should have asked her I suppose, but I think it would have been too depressing.

The prosecutions and legal actions that have been taking place recently in numerous sports, notably but far from uniquely gymnastics, offer horrible evidence of boundaries between sport and sex being transgressed. A heinous backstory has also been emerging in football over recent years of predatory sexual behaviour and abuse of young players, male and female.

There is no argument about this, and how wrong it is. But beyond these clear areas of wrongdoing, there are other, greyer, areas involving interpretation and promotion of sports.

Last Saturday (June 26) the live broadcast feed of the bouldering semi-finals at the International Sport Climbing Federation (IFSC) World Cup in Innsbruck were temporarily removed from the Federation’s YouTube channel and edited after complaints from viewers over inappropriate footage of a female climber.

The host broadcaster, ORF, showed a slow-motion sequence lasting around five seconds zooming in on chalk handprints on the backside of home climber Johanna Färber while she took part in the women’s bouldering semi-final.

According to observers, there was an immediate criticism of the footage on the live chat accompanying the feed, but despite this the sequence was repeated at the conclusion of the semi-finals, prompting yet more complaints.

The sequences were later edited out of the footage, and an apology issued which the IFSC featured on their Twitter feed.

ORF, issued an apology on Twitter.

Later that night Färber posted a message on her Instagram account describing the footage, which had already been posted throughout social media, as being "disrespectful and upsetting", adding: "We need to stop sexualising women in sports and start to appreciate their performance."

One can only speculate on the thought processes that led to that footage being created. And slowed down. And - despite rising protests from many of the dedicated crew who regularly follow a sport that will make its Olympic debut in Tokyo this summer - repeated.

I spoke at some length over the weekend to a truly legendary Olympic sportswoman, Angela Ruggiero, who won a gold, two silvers and a bronze at the Games between 1998 and 2010 before retiring and becoming an International Olympic Committee (IOC) member and chair of the IOC Athletes Commission from 2016 to 2018.

Since then Ruggiero has held the post of chief strategy officer for the Los Angeles Olympic bid, an effort that saw the reward of being assigned the Games of 2028.

She is founder and chief executive of Sport Innovation Lab, a technologically powered sports market research firm, and is currently publicising the latest piece of work, entitled the Fan Project, which analysed fans’ social data going back four or in some cases ten years to get a reading on how women’s sports, all too often relegated from mainstream coverage, were being followed and enjoyed.

One of the empirical aspects of this process was the way in which events were being watched on a wide range of OTT and digital channels, as they were simply not covered on the traditional terrestrial versions.

It’s entirely understandable. It’s the way sport is going. But one of the advantages of the traditional terrestrials is that they are regulated and policed in a way that is not the case for more fragmentary media operations.

And that can sometimes lead to problems.