Yes, Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani has clung on to the number one spot for another year.

But the follower count required to secure a top 20 ranking has more than doubled year-on-year, and now exceeds 10,000.

Just two years ago, indeed, Germany’s Britta Heidemann, an Olympic fencing champion from Beijing 2008, required only just over 3,000 followers to secure 20th spot in the 2018 table.

And when we published our first IOC top tweeters ranking at the start of 2014 – hardly an eon ago, except perhaps in social media terms – Paul Tergat, the Kenyan former long-distance runner then in 20^th spot, had just 62 followers.

All told, nine of the 104 current IOC members now command a following of 100,000 or more, the equivalent of a good-sized town.

So, while social media remains a force for bad as well as good, and carries obvious risks for public figures, both the number of IOC members with a meaningful presence on the Twitter platform and the popularity of their accounts continue to grow.

For that reason it now makes sense to expand the size of the table, making it a top 40, rather than top 20, ranking.

Altogether, eight new members were inducted into sport’s most prestigious club in 2020 – and three of them have burst straight into the top 10 of our new ranking.

The highest-placed, in second spot, is Princess Reema Bandar Al-Saud, the 45-year-old Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States of America.

Notwithstanding her other responsibilities, Bandar Al-Saud’s Twitter feed includes a good proportion of sports-related material.

Her presence in the IOC means that this ranking of IOC tweeters has become yet another realm in which Saudi Arabia’s intense rivalry with neighbour Qatar may be played out.

For now, she has taken over from Costa Rica’s Laura Chinchilla as Sheikh Tamim’s closest challenger.

(For the purposes of this exercise, we monitor two accounts - @TameemAlthani, much the more popular, and @TheSheikhTamim.)

The other newcomers to the top 10 are both European - World Athletics President Sebastian Coe and former President of Croatia, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović.

Grabar-Kitarović’s recent tweets included a congratulatory message to "President-elect" Joe Biden and "first woman VP" Kamala Harris.

The 52-year-old’s US ties go back a long way, she was educated at Los Alamos High School in New Mexico, was a Fulbright scholar and has also served as Croatia’s US Ambassador.

The 64-year-old Coe might conceivably have been elected to the IOC almost any time in the past three decades, but finally made it this year.

An accomplished tweeter, his feed - like those of many of my writer-acquaintances – now includes the occasional plug for his podcasts.

Taking into account Chinchilla and Indonesia’s Erick Thohir, who still occupies fourth place in the table, fully half of the top 10 tweeters have become IOC members in the last two years.

While just 37.5 per cent of current IOC members are women – 39 out of 104 – the gender split among the top 40 tweeters is 22 men to 18 women, the equivalent of 55 per cent male and 45 per cent female.

The geographical spread is, as ever, impressive, with 14 Europeans, 11 from the Americas and Caribbean, nine Asians, four Africans and two from Oceania.