Formula One, football, the Olympics - all have sold their souls to dictators to help promote abhorrent regimes

Since Bernie Ecclestone thinks nothing of holding tête-à-têtes with tyrants in his own image, he was asked in Sakhir last year if he would ever countenance taking a grand prix to Syria. "We'd have to have a look and see," he replied. Then, it seemed like just another of the fossilised funster's glib little jokes. Now, with 'enemy of the West' Vladimir Putin handing out trophies in Sochi and the Formula One calendar for 2016 poised to include Bahrain, Russia, China and Azerbaijan - a veritable luxury cruise around the world's dictatorships - we can no longer be so sure.

That F1 remains such an incorrigible moral vacuum should come as little surprise. Increasingly, it is only autocratic regimes desperate to use sport as propaganda who are gullible enough to pay the exorbitant asking price for hosting a race, even when Ecclestone takes everything besides the ticket revenue. Take Azerbaijan, for example. Last week one of the country's most tenacious reporters, Khadija Ismayilova, was subject to criminal libel charges that could consign her to a three-year prison sentence, in a move described by the Committee to Protect Journalists as part of a "long pattern of official harassment".

But hey, the Azeris are spending £60 million for the privilege of arranging their glitzy spin around the streets of Baku, so who is worrying about the gerrymandering of some friendly media coverage? Nobody in F1, that is for sure. The average paddock is at such a remove from the cultural and political reality into which it has been parachuted that it might as well be on the moon. The drivers' annual four-day experience of Bahrain is so superficial that they see nothing of life in this complex Gulf kingdom besides the circuit, courtesy car, and their five-star hotels in Manama's diplomatic quarter. The fact that the state has stockpiled over 1.6 million canisters of tear gas to crush dissent among a population of only 1.2 million is of blissful irrelevance to them.

Lewis Hamilton claimed it was "very cool" to have met Putin on the podium last weekend. The issue that received rather less analysis - certainly from rights-holders Sky, so terrified of offending Ecclestone that they depicted Russia solely in terms of the blue sky and the lovely Black Sea waters - is the scandal of a sport lionising Putin after his annexation of Crimea and the months of bloodshed in Ukraine. Then again, F1 always proudly proclaims itself as a geopolitics-free zone. "We're here to race," parrot the petrolheads, any sense of morality or intellectual curiosity scrambled by all those exhaust fumes.

Have any of them stopped to consider the speciousness, the sheer stupidity of the argument that sport and politics do not mix? The notion that a sport of global reach, in which most races are subsidised to a large degree at government level, can exist in some vast political void is at best risibly naive, at worst downright dangerous. What else should we expect, though, of the 83‑year-old Ecclestone, who thinks of Putin as such a swell guy that he "completely agrees" with the Russian president's Byzantine views on homosexuality?

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that in a democracy, we get the government we deserve. But in the self-serving, self-perpetuating fiefdoms of world sport, we end up with unaccountable leaders in thrall to their fellow despots. So it is that the preposterous buffoon Sepp Blatter has engineered a Fifa voting system of such corruption that the next two World Cups will be held in Russia and Qatar, where the Crimean situation and abuses of Doha's migrant workers are wafted aside like trifling inconveniences.

So it is that the International Olympic Committee will choose the hosts of the 2022 Winter Games in a game of dictatorship roulette, with only Beijing and the Kazakh city of Almaty left as bidders after Oslo balked at the 7,000‑page shopping list of demands, right down to the aperitifs it should serve dignitaries ahead of the opening ceremony. And so it is that next summer's world swimming championships will be held in the remote Russian city of Kazan, at Putin's behest, after European cities opted not to challenge out of horror at the likely cost overruns.

Fina, swimming's governing body, is so craven in its courting of Putin that this month it rewarded him with its highest accolade, bestowed only upon "individuals who have achieved remarkable merit in the world of aquatics". It is difficult to specify precisely what Putin's contribution in the aquatic sphere might be, besides overseeing the slow death of the Aral Sea, but Fina is so crawling in its deference to him for saving the showpiece event that it is content to let this question pass.

An indication of the ethical standards at work in swimming is that Fina once saw fit to give the same honour to Dr Lothar Kipke, a convicted criminal who administered drugs to his East German athletes on an industrial scale and who was labelled in open court as the "Josef Mengele of GDR sport". Ingratiating itself with Putin to ensure a share of his huge pile of roubles is arguably the least of Fina's transgressions.

But if we dare to glimpse across the horizon, we see a future where sport is ever more abjectly dependent on the riches of dubious governments. Oslo, by common consent the most expensive city on Earth, could easily have afforded to stage the Winter Olympics. But its bid team took a hard, reasoned look at the IOC's requirements - the banquets, the audience with the king, the small army of blazers with their endless expense accounts - and decided it was not worth the bother. In many ways, it was an admirable gesture. But it threatens to embolden a rotten regime like Kazakhstan, consistently ranked among the worst in the world for press freedom and upholding civil liberties, to try to fill the gap.

It is salutary to revisit an article from the Foreign Affairs journal, published in 1936, entitled Dictators discover sport. The piece dwells upon how Stalin used sport to control the young, how Mussolini would use it to militarise a nation, and how Hitler would use it in an attempt at demonstrating racial superiority. The unifying factor, though, is that they all looked to sport to provide a fig-leaf of legitimacy for their abhorrent systems of power. Nearly 80 years on, as we watch Ecclestone pitch F1's tent in whatever crooked country happens to wave the next cheque, it is tempting to wonder whether anything has changed.

Hall of fame insults the game

Halls of fame are a peculiarly American obsession, the product of a young country's desire to place anybody of the most fleeting distinction upon a pedestal. Conditions for induction to the golfing version appear arbitrary.

In 2012 it let Colin Montgomerie in, even though he had not won a major or a PGA Tour event. And yet this week the denizens of the World Golf Hall of Fame in St Augustine, Florida, left off the shortlist a certain Ian Woosnam, winner of the 1991 Masters and a former world No 1. It is not so much a sin of omission as an insult.