Locker Room:The Olympic movement is a strange multi-headed beast with no single, defining characteristic except perhaps its expedient knack for survival and self-perpetuation. For most us it is a beast which sleeps for 47 months out of 48 in a quadrennial cycle, but for the month when it all comes alive it is the greatest show on earth, selling us shimmering illusions about the possibilities of humanity and the glories of sporting patriotism.

Between times there is enough going on though to ensure that the Olympics actually qualify as a bona fide global industry.

Oddly, the best time to see what the Olympic movement is all about is not at an Olympic celebration but at one of the organisation's congresses, which are orgies of pure, distilled politics. And the best congresses are the ones where the IOC finds itself in the happy position of listening to the flattery and promise of the cities bidding to host the summer games.

Politicians, celebrities and potentates come to town and prostrate themselves before the IOC members, pleading for the indulgence of a receptive ear, offering favours, compliments, promises and, in the good old days, nice gifts.

And there is nothing quite like the drama that unfolds when the IOC president gathers everyone into a big room and announces the winning city. No one Olympic medal can match the amount of work, graft and effort which goes into securing an Olympic Games.

In Singapore a few years ago London won after an epic campaign only when Tony Blair outschmoozed Jacques Chirac, who, thinking the gig was in the bag for Paris, jetted home after a perfunctory round of air-kisses and bonjours.

It had been predicted a Paris Olympics would add 40 billion to the French economy over 14 years and create 45,000 permanent jobs. That failure contributed another nail to the coffin then closing on Chirac's epic career.

And London won. The old-fashioned way.

The Olympic movement, while pretending to be sternly shopping for tight-fitting hairshirts, is always a little vulnerable in that soft underbelly where it keeps its ego. Paris offered to accommodate the Olympics, to run a tight and stringent ship. London offered to transform itself. London offered celebrities and magic. The IOC loved it. London outromanced Paris.

Something similar had happened years ago in Monte Carlo when Sydney threw so many promises of good vibrations into the mix that Beijing was beaten. Juan Antonio Samaranch's face darkened on that occasion, however. The members had voted for sport. They had had the opportunity to vote for influence.

So six years ago when we all gathered in Moscow for Beijing's next attempt there was no real suspense. Beijing offered a massive, virgin market. It offered efficiency and all the other things. But for sponsors and TV it offered a population of over a billion who over the next couple of decades will be getting used to credit cards and consumer-price indices and all the other ephemera which clutter our own lives.

The Chinese didn't do the meet-and-greet. They offered the market. Take it or leave it.

A few people raised questions about China's human-rights record. The Olympic nabobs seemed slightly embarrassed such a thing should be raised with their new best friends. There was talk about progress and the road to democracy. A vote was taken and everyone shouted hurrah.

And here we are 18 months away from an Olympic Games which promises to be fascinating, a celebration which will be held within some of the most stunning stadium architecture the world has seen, and how are the Chinese doing on that ticklish human-rights business?

We wondered because of word trickling out about the number of deaths of building workers on the Olympic construction sites. Chinese workers aren't allowed join independent trade unions. The Olympics, like almost all commercial projects in China, it seems, are a bulldozer. Workers die so we can have our sport.

China still leads the world in practice of the death penalty, moving in recent times from a shot in the back of the head to the lethal injection (vans are used as sort of mobile execution-units). And we still read about those eerily Orwellian classes of punishment the state metes out: Re-education Through Labour, Custody and Education, Enforced Drug Rehabilitation.

According to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (there's a job you can't do a course for) the practice of torture in China is "widespread". The rapporteur visited China in 2005 for the first time after years of obstruction from the government.

And freedom of expression is merrily violated. Dozens of journalists and internet activists are documented as being in prison. The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC) published a survey on August 7th, 2006, which removed any hankerings we had to become part of the FCCC. They reported the police had detained foreign journalists on at least 38 occasions over the previous two years, most of them while covering stories relating to social issues.

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! are among the big, new media companies to have facilitated internet repression in China as part of the government censorship programme. All this despite promises, made by the Beijing bidding committee, of full press freedom by 2008.

To list these things is to give only part of the story, as anyone who reads the reports from Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch in recent years will testify.

Does it matter? Should we just tune ourselves into the mating call of the shrill empty heads who insist "politics and sport should never mix"? Unfortunately the Olympic Movement sets itself rather grandiose aims, and in the case of the Beijing games, human-rights violations have taken place even in direct relation to the organisation of the games.

Some 300,000 Beijing residents have been swept out of their homes, typically without proper compensation, for the sake of Olympic redevelopment of the city. Most prominent is the case of Ye Guozhu, who having been evicted attempted to organise a peaceful rally of protest. He was hauled up before Number Two Beijing Intermediate Court in December 2004 and charged (I have to admit that in a country that lets Eamon Dunphy roam free I like the sound of this) with "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble". For that Ye Ghouzu got four years, none of which apparently have been filled with the sort of fun we associate with Olympic celebration. In Dongcheng District Detention centre he was suspended from the ceiling by the arms and beaten by police. He was also reportedly tortured in late 2005 while in Qingyuan prison, where he was refusing to admit his "guilt". The beatings involved electro-shock batons.

Ye Ghouzu is obviously a bad egg from a poor batch. His younger brother, Ye Guoqiang, had previously attempted suicide in a protest against the forced eviction of the family from their home. After he had jumped into the Jinshui River near Tiananmen Square, he was arrested, let dry and then sentenced to two years in prison for disturbing social order.

We had a minor squall this week on the letters page of this paper over the issue of dead construction workers and what number of same is acceptable as the price of a jolly good Olympic celebration. The issues, the tragedies and the problems in which the IOC has become complicit go far deeper, however.

Anyway faster, higher, stronger and all that. Let's not allow the real world to get in the way of sport.