A true picture is trickier than ever to bring into focus in 2021; this is because of an extra source of fuzziness as a consequence of the postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games.

You might assume that the regular four-year Olympic cycle had simply morphed into a one-off five-year "quadrennium" - to be followed, as night follows day, by a three-year quad, from 2022 to 2024.

This though would be an oversimplification: while revenues from Tokyo 2020 broadcasting rights have indeed been taken into account one year late, the other main revenue source - The Olympic Partner (TOP) worldwide sponsorship scheme - seems to have rumbled on largely as per normal, in terms of the value-in-kind, marketing-in-kind and cash that it propels in the IOC’s direction.

This has meant that, for once, what I regard as the golden rule of IOC financial analysis - be sure to have the accounts from four years earlier at your fingertips too - is not enough; to be exact, it is still necessary, but on this occasion not sufficient.

So it has taken a few days, but I think I have finally disentangled a few interesting trends to set out for your consideration.

Thomas Bach and his Lausanne acolytes just love to bang on about how much money the IOC redistributes day by day - and, let’s be fair, an awful lot of sports bodies around the world would struggle to survive without their share of the Olympic Games dividend.

What the IOC does not always do, certainly in my opinion, is provide a particularly full picture of where the cash - and goods and services supplied by TOP sponsors - finally ends up.

The IOC has said that its total revenue over what it seems to be referring to as the "2017-2020/2021 Olympiad" reached $7.6 billion (£6.1 billion/€7.1 billion).

According to the 2016 financial statements, total revenue between 2013 and 2016 amounted to $5.7 billion (£4.6 billion/€5.3 billion).

That is tantamount to an increase of $1.9 billion (£1.5 billion/€1.8 billion), or 33 per cent.

So, given 33 per cent as the average hike in payment which those dependent on IOC distributions might have expected, I thought it would be interesting to try to work out those who have fared relatively well out of the Pyeongchang/Tokyo cycle and those who have fared relatively badly.

Those who keep on top of the insidethegames news stream will have noted that I have already identified one group of "winners" from the latest cycle.

This is the IOC’s trusty executive management.

Their aggregate salaries and short-term benefits reached $13.95 million (£11.2 million/€13.2 million) in 2021, up from $11.65 million (£9.3 million/€11 million) a year earlier and just $8.5 million (£6.8 million/€8 million) in 2017. 

This amounts to an advance of more than 64 per cent between 2017 and 2021, although the number of individuals covered may not have remained constant.

After crunching the numbers, another body which I have firmly on my list of "winners" is the dear old United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC).

To work this out, you need to delve deep into the Notes of several sets of accounts.

According to my arithmetic, these Notes indicate that between 2013 and 2016, the IOC distributed a tidy $404.4 million (£323.5 million/€377.7 million) to the National Olympic Committee (NOC) of what is still just about the world’s biggest economy.

Totting up the same figures from IOC accounts between 2017 and 2021, I arrive at a figure of $781.8 million (£625.4 million/€730.2 million).

That would amount to a truly stunning increment of more than 93 per cent.

The fuzziness of this last Olympiad means that I do not regard that figure as entirely fair, however.

Why? Because it includes five years of contributions from the IOC’s TOP programme.

For a like-to-like comparison, it seems to me that one should lop off last year’s TOP-derived contribution, which more properly belongs with the current Beijing 2022/Paris 2024 cycle.

This produces a figure of $664.6 million (£531.7 million/€620.7 million) - equivalent to, believe it or not, an increase from 2013-2016 of just over 64 per cent, almost identical to that sainted IOC executive management team.

And so, we can unmask another Winner: the USOPC.

The next obvious question, or so it seemed to me, was how have the NOCs from the 200-plus countries covering the rest of planet Earth fared?

Applying the same methodology, I arrive at a figure of $740.95 million (£592.8 million/€692 million) distributed to NOCs over the 2013-2016 quadrennium.

Turning to 2017-2021, the distributions add up to $879.6 million (£703.7 million/€821.5 million).

Deduct the $96.6 million (£77.3 million/€90.2 million) pertaining to TOP in 2021, and you are left with $783 million (£626.4 million/€731.3 million).

While not a sum of money to be sniffed at, by my calculations, this amounts to a rise of just 5.7 per cent from the 2013-2016 aggregate, far smaller than the 64 per cent lift enjoyed by the USOPC.

What particularly surprised me was that if you strip out distributions to NOCs from the TOP programme, their payments actually appear to have fallen: from $428.4 million (£342.7 million/€400 million) in 2016 to $367.9 million (£294.3 million/€343.6 million) in 2021; and from $154.2 million (£123.4 million/€144 million) in 2014 to $84.3 million (£67.4 million/€78.7 million) in 2018.

To paraphrase George Orwell, all NOCs are equal, but some are more equal than others.

For the purposes of this exercise, unlike the fortunate USOPC, the remaining NOCs must troop across to the "Loser" side of our ledger.

Finally (for now), to a group who have done even worse over the last Olympic cycle than the rank-and-file NOCs: the Summer Olympic International Federations (IFs).

This is much more transparent - in 2021, the distribution they received from the IOC totalled $540.3 million (£432.2 million/€504.6 million); in 2016, the distribution they received from the IOC totalled…$540.3 million.

By my calculations, this amounts to an increase of, oh, a big fat zero.

It could have been much worse of course: had Tokyo 2020 been cancelled altogether, then that big fat zero might have been the size of their payment, as opposed to their increase.

Even so, it means, I am afraid, that they must be designated "Losers" for the purposes of this exercise.

It also makes me wonder, not for the first time, whose interests the likely dissolution of the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) is really in.

But that, as they say, is another story.