by John Bryant, author of Lords of the Olympics.
Here are a couple of bizarre (and slightly quiz-show) facts about the London Olympics.
This is the third time that London has held the Olympic Games - but the city has only bid for them once: for the 2012 Games. The Olympics of 1908 and 1948 came to London because no-one else wanted to stage them.
Bizarre fact number 2: The London Olympics have all been masterminded by Lords - very British and very aristocratic and covering more than a century- Lord Desborough, Lord Burghley and, in 2012, Lord Sebastian Coe.
Lord Desborough, the perfect Edwardian sportsman - cricketer, sculler, fencer and huntsman - masterminded the 1908 Games in just two years when a near bankrupt Rome pulled out following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. He bequeathed the Edwardian concept of "play up, play up and play the game" which was to set the tone of international sport for seventy years.
Lord Burghley saved the Games in 1948 when two great wars ripped the world apart. The Olympics should have gone to Helsinki, but they were bombed out. Britain had won World War II in 1945 and Lord Burghley defiantly staged the so-called make-do-and-mend Olympics.
Burghley was played in the film Chariots of Fire, about the 1924 Olympics, by Nigel Havers. And in the fictional Chariots of Fire this Lord practised hurdling with glasses of champagne on each flight as an incentive to keep his stride high and true.
For Burghley and his team improvisation was the order of the day. They had to feed, house and equip teams from all over the world - all this on a budget of £761,000. Bring your own soap and towel was the order of the day.
Male competitors were housed in military camps, the women in schools and colleges. With petrol on ration, there was no special transport. Visiting teams were asked to bring food with them. An athletics training camp was set up for one week at Billy Butlin's holiday camp in Clacton on Sea.
So much has changed since those innocent days of 1948. The Olympics are now big business. Commercialisation and professionalism are everywhere. In 2012 spectre of drugs haunts the Games - those were happy days in 1948 when the stimulant of choice was Horlicks.
Lord Coe faced a very different problem when he entered the race to bring the Olympics back to London. In a fiercely commercial world everyone wants the Games. He can draw inspiration from Desborough and Burghley, and hope that an Olympic Lord can triumph once again.
The trick for Seb Coe is to preserve the Corinthian dreams that he shared as a competitor and, at the same time, tame the monster of commercialisation that threatens to ruin the Games.
How well he will pull this off is explored in Lords of the Olympics where the fight for his Olympic legacy ensures that Lord Coe is in the toughest race of his life.
John Bryant is the author of Lords of the Olympics and Chris Brasher - The Man who made the London Marathon.