Keith’s mum says you understood two things better than anyone:

1. That knowledge is power

2. That in any election, you should focus solely on the electorate.

You offered clients insight into how sports politics really works.

For that reason, the International Olympic Committee top brass never really warmed to you.

E.J.Thribb (Aged 17 ½ )

Here is a number for fencing enthusiasts to think about: 93.02.

A clue? It is a percentage.

To be exact, the percentage of the International Fencing Federation (FIE)’s 2020 income that was donated by Alisher Usmanov, the governing body’s President.

93.02 per cent!

Admittedly, 2020 was the mother and father of atypical years

Ordinarily, the FIE would have received some CHF15 million (£12 million/$16.5 million/€14.5 million) for the sport’s contribution to Tokyo 2020.

This will instead have been banked a year later in 2021.

But the FIE’s financial dependence on its Russian billionaire President is nothing new.

By my arithmetic, if you include the CHF5 million (£4 million/$5.5 million/€4.8 million) donations written into the 2021 and 2022 budgets, Usmanov has gifted the FIE somewhere in the region of CHF90 million (£72 million/$98.5 million/€86 million) since the Olympic Games were last staged in China in 2008.

At CHF15 million a pop, that is six Olympic Games’ worth of contributions.

I suppose the first reaction must always be, "And a jolly good job too!".

All else being equal, the FIE’s cost-base would have to be a heck of a lot lower if not for its wealthy benefactor.

But, of course, the situation also raises questions.

For example: no matter how great his love of the sport, it would only be natural - wouldn’t it? - for Usmanov to expect something in return for his cash.

Is the sport satisfied it knows what, if anything, this "something" is? And is it comfortable with this?

More importantly, is it planning for a future when, inevitably, the man from Chust is no longer there?

The 68-year-old was recently re-elected President by acclamation, so this is unlikely to be for some time.

Nonetheless, the eventuality will, sooner or later, need to be faced.

Looking at the present state of the finances, I would say the evidence appears mixed.

On a positive note, the FIE’s balance sheet shows a CHF20 million (£16 million/$22 million/€19 million) reserve fund, enough to tide it over for a few years.

I suppose that the Russian is wealthy enough to make arrangements to ensure that his regular CHF5 million or so-a-year donations outlive him; indeed, perhaps he has already done so.

But what is more worrying is the paucity of alternative revenue sources.

As I said, 2020 was an atypical year, but, aside from the President’s donation, income amounted to just CHF282,625 (£226,665/$309,192/€271,037).

Even in the comparatively normal year of 2019, the Federation generated only just over CHF500,000 (£401,000/$547,000/€479,500) from member Federations, and just CHF333,631 (£267,572/$364,992/€319,952) from communications and marketing income.

It is probably difficult to achieve in practice, but ideally one would hope that the sport would be taking advantage of these years of plenty thanks to the generosity of one man not to kick back and relax, but to diversify revenue sources so that other income streams could pick up the strain when the time comes.

As other sports have learnt, this in the end is the best guarantee of independence.

And so, it seems, tickets to the upcoming Winter Games in Beijing will not be sold to the general public.

As my colleague Liam Morgan reported yesterday, tickets will be available, but only as "part of an adapted programme that will invite groups of spectators to be present on site during the Games".

It would be interesting to know on what basis these groups are to be selected; it is probably safe to say that overt espousal of the Tibetan or Uighur causes is unlikely to be high on any list of desirable invitee attributes.

Indeed, with these Games set to be beamed to the world from inside the organisers’ closed-loop management system, one cannot help wondering whether the term "extras" may turn out to be more apposite than "spectators".

The Winter Olympics will be staged at a time when China’s quite extraordinary economic miracle appears to be under more pressure than for years.

Fourth-quarter figures, as reported by Western media yesterday, showed year-on-year gross domestic product growth slowing to four per cent - which would be outstandingly good for most European countries, but is well down on the sort of levels China has come to regard as standard.

The property sector, long one of the main locomotives, finally appears to be struggling and the Omicron variant of COVID is now starting to spread.

In these comparatively tough times, a rigidly-controlled Olympics should provide President Xi Jinping with both a useful distraction and an enviable springboard from which to launch an expected push for a new five-year term as Chinese Communist Party head later in the year.