It was in 2004, and it alerted me immediately to what an odd beast the Olympic football competition has become.

If the present brouhaha over a possible doubling of the number of World Cups leads to bad blood between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and world football governing body FIFA, as it well might, I would join colleague Liam Morgan in questioning how much football really adds to the Summer Olympics besides – pre-COVID – a big wodge of ticket sales.

It was while awaiting the Athens 2004 Olympic Opening Ceremony that I pitched up in the Cretan port of Heraklion, once besieged by Ottomans for 21 years, for an early match in the women’s soccer competition.

This pitted the mighty United States, Mia Hamm and all, against host nation Greece.

Yet even with this evident local interest – not to mention the fact that the Greek men’s team had recently pulled off a stupendous upset by winning the 2004 European football championship – the brand new 27,000-seat stadium where I took up position was little more than half-full.

What made the occasion strange was not only that it was a mismatch – the US won 3-0, but I noted in my match report that 5-0 or 6-0 would more fairly have reflected the balance of play – but the game could almost have been presented as the US first team against a US Greek heritage XI.

No fewer than six of the home team’s starting eleven were listed as playing for US clubs.

In exchanges with media afterwards, Maria Giatrakis, the Greece side’s hard-working goalkeeper, pronounced herself a Yankees fan in a pitch-perfect American accent. A California Storm midfielder called Tanya Kalyvas explained that with women’s football at that time "unfortunately…not very developed in Greece", some players had arrived as the result of a recruitment drive.

Kalyvas herself, whose father was born in Greece, had read an article in a Greek-American journal "saying they were recruiting players". This had led to her attending a trial in Greece in June 2002.

That Greek squad, I think it is fair to say, would have stood little chance of qualifying had Greece not been the host nation; but at least most top women players do turn out for the Olympic football tournament.

The men’s Olympic football competition for its part remains age-capped, albeit with berths for three over-age players per team. This almost inevitably keeps many of the world’s brightest stars away, even when their nations do qualify.

I noted back in 2004 that the Australia men’s team which played Tunisia straight after that US v Greece women’s match featured players from Bristol City and Partick Thistle, fine institutions both, but not among the very top British clubs.

It was a perfectly pleasant – and educational - experience getting my first taste of Olympic football as the sky reddened over the rugged Cretan skyline, much pleasanter no doubt than spending the day cooped up in the Main Press Centre. But since then I have always rather wondered what football at the Olympics really achieves or is meant to achieve.

What a great advertisement Saturday’s women’s singles final at Flushing Meadows was for tennis. It was also a great advertisement for liberal immigration policies.

Teenage adversaries Leylah Fernandez and Emma Raducanu were born two months apart in the neighbouring Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Their respective parents, though, could scarcely have more eclectic roots.

Fernandez’s father is from Ecuador, while her mum is described by Wikipedia as a Filipino Canadian. In Raducanu’s case, her dad hails from Romania and her mother China. The family moved to Britain when Emma was two, which must have been around the same time that London was winning that titanic race to host the 2012 Olympics.

Who knows whether the new US Open champion would have developed into such an outstanding tennis player had she grown up in Toronto. If she had, though, Saturday would have been one of the proudest days in Canadian sporting history – and the British media would scarcely have batted an eyelid.

What a complicated business nationality can be in the modern world, as these stories show, but how the ease of international travel and personal interactions that have made it so enrich us all.