As long-time Olympic marketing expert Michael Payne tweeted: "Sounds like the Chinese have understood the media just perfectly!"

He wasn’t wrong.

When I arrived in the reporters’ room on my first day on my first, local paper, I took my place behind a desk that held a typewriter of roughly the size and dimensions of a football stand and a bent spike of metal anchored by a wooden base onto which press releases and sheets of pink copy paper had been ruthlessly speared.

I could barely discern the tools of my impending trade through a fug of smoke. (Tobacco had recently arrived in England thanks to Sir Walter Raleigh).

It trailed from cigarettes being vigorously or languorously handled by male and female colleagues. It puffed gently out from the pipe clamped in the jaws of the chief reporter.

When I got home and hung up my coat it smelled as if it had been kippered.

This was journalism all right - something I had seen in films, something to be done with eyes narrowed against the file of smoke rising from the cigarette dangling on one’s lower lip.

But I took a decision early. I could tell that if I built smoking into my working routine it would be there for life. And even back in the 16^th century or whenever - I forget exactly how far back it was - that was not regarded as a smart health move.

I have had dear colleagues who made a different decision, and required cigarettes - many of them, every working day and night - in order to produce the required copy.

But while I steered successfully away from a regular tobacco routine I can’t say the same with regard to alcohol. And again, in this, among my journalist colleagues, I am very far from being alone.

Arriving early one morning at a motel in Auckland in 1990, my base for covering the 14^th Commonwealth Games, I glanced into the bar and saw one of my illustrious colleagues seated snugly in a corner with a notepad in front of him - he hadn’t embraced new technology at this point and I’m not sure if or when he did - alongside which was what looked very much like a large glass of whisky. Because that was what it was.

He referred to it as "intro juice." Another built-in routine of questionable health…

For me, and many of the colleagues with whom I have covered events in places far and near, it has mostly been plain and simple beer or lager that has marked the days - or rather, the evenings.

By and large - other than some for whom the consumption of alcohol was something darker and deeper - this has been the drink of choice. And it has almost always been at the end of a working day (when such a concept used to exist…)

You could call it outro juice I suppose. For me, the first sip of a drink has marked that happy moment when the immediate tasks are done, the moment of clocking off.

All very basic and unvarying. A carrot on a stick which this donkey has always been content to move towards.

Looking back to my most recent gig, the belated Tokyo 2020 Olympics, I recall with fondness the beers I and my fearsomely industrious young colleagues managed to grab from the vending machine in the lobby of our friendly little hotel, often in the small hours. Right comradely it was.

I would certainly not like to think that my young compadres will face the prospect of a No Beer Olympics when they get to Beijing.

I recall that chill prospect bothering many of us shortly before the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, which was founded by Mormons, among whose beliefs is abstention from alcohol.

We respected these beliefs. But we were not Mormons. And so, we wondered if, maybe, somewhere…

Once we got there, however, the Dead Goat Saloon, with nightly blues, and booze, calmed all those cares away. Rarely can a bar have been so loved.

Meanwhile news arrives of another feature of the Beijing 2022 Olympic Games .

Organisers have disclosed further uses for robots that will be deployed at the Wukesong Arena - the ice hockey venue.

Tokyo 2020 had some ambitious plans for similar robotic activity, but apparently went cold on the idea when it became clear that there would be no spectators and media numbers would be well down on the normal Games level.

These latest little automatic movers, apparently, are programmed to make coffee.

According to the Chinese Communist Party's People's Daily newspaper the robots can grind coffee beans and place them in a percolator for the requisite four minutes. And they can also fetch and carry when required.

So far, so good. By way of the next stage, I suggest programming that will enable the pouring of a beer with a decent head on it, or the mixing of a decent gin-and-tonic….

Cheers.