YOU know, it could only happen here in this country where the majority of sporting success is achieved despite adversity and in spite of the almost obligatory financial handicaps.

This week our esteemed Government – whatever way you look at it, an administration built on a treatment of the truth so economical as to be a downright lie – announced a new cash boost for next year’s Olympic Games.

But just hold those celebratory “hurrahs” in your throats. The proposed extra £41 million of public money is not to support athletes or increase grass-root participation in the myriad of sports that comprise the Olympics.

No, that £41 million, even if you say it quickly it still sounds a hell of a lot of cash, is for the ceremonies that will preface and end the 2012 Olympiad.

That’s not the total cost mind you. That £41 million is on top of the stack of moolah already set aside for such pomp and paraphernalia by the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games.

The Olympics minister, Hugh Robertson, was a study of Conservative smugness when he snootily informed that the extra funding represented a “look at us” window to the rest of the world.

It would be an investment to attract both business and tourism to these shores, purred the Cheshire cat who has not only got the cream, but the run of the entire dairy.

Yet it is a funding windfall that absolutely beggars belief.

For in the very same week as the largesse was unveiled, we had 200 metres sprinter James Ellington hiring himself out on eBay in a desperate bid to attract the £30,000 he believes he needs in sponsorship to enable to compete for Olympic success in just over nine months’ time.

The Lewisham-based runner took time on national television to point out if a company, or companies, agreed over the ten days’ duration of his heartfelt internet appeal to back him, then he would represent that firm or firms in any publicity he could.

Ellington’s enterprise is to be applauded, but I cannot help think in this day and age and, especially when so much money is awash for pyrotechnics, choreographed flummery and themed window-dressing, that it is outrageous that such a talented athlete has to virtually pimp himself to keep alive his dream of running in the Olympic Games in his own British backyard.

Closer to the York and North Yorkshire heartland of The Press, our own world athletics championship medallist, 400m runner Richard Buck, is currently having to combine training with a part-time job.

Buck is stacking shelves in a supermarket to make ends meet after he was cut from the list of athletes who receive funding to enable them to remain full-time, fully-focused athletes.

Just £20,000 would get the 24-year-old City of York Athletics Club one-lap specialist back on track to achieve his Olympic aspirations.

No wonder esteemed and elite British athlete Paula Radcliffe, selected for her fifth Olympic Games next summer, described the new injection of cash for ceremonies as “a little bit frivolous”.

Methinks Radcliffe was being a tad diplomatic.

Deep down we all know that lashing out another massive outlay on periphery such as opening and closing ceremonies is nothing short of scandalous.

And it’s even more galling that such a torrent of riches should gush from a Government which stresses at every available millisecond the need to be financially more miserly than Scrooge himself.

It’s an eerie echo of the “bread and circuses” maxim of the Roman Empire. Instead of lions and gladiators, next summer it will be lasers and graphics.

For those to whom it matters, few spectators thought the opening and closing rites of the Sydney Olympics of 2000 would be bettered.

Then when China upped the ante four years ago in Beijing, there was an even greater feeling that, first, any future Olympiad would not match that, and, second, that London should not even attempt such a feat.

Yet here we are. A colossal treasure chest set aside for an event that few will remember once the last convoluted routine is over, once the final firework fizzles to its ground-hitting phut.

Certainly from the Olympic Games I have watched over the past four decades, I can remember supreme athletic achievements, personalities and drama.

Apart from Muhammad Ali setting the Olympic torch alight in Atlanta in 1996, I do not recall any other opening or closing palaver.