The Briton, whose 27-year term as an International Olympic Committee (IOC) member ended at the end of last year after reaching the age limit of 80, caused a storm when he warned that the current ban on athletes from Russia and Belarus imposed following the invasion of Ukraine could be maintained for Paris 2024.

"A decision is going to have to be taken on what happens to each of these two countries, and my guess is that the general feeling would be that they should not qualify," the former IOC vice-president told British media.

"Most people are struggling with how we could achieve some degree of representation, but at the moment, there is no clear way to do it. 

"Therefore, you maintain the status quo."

The comments of Sir Craig, now an honorary IOC member, were hardly that reactionary and echoed what many other leading sports administrators are saying privately as it becomes clear that the war in Ukraine is not going to be over any time soon and increasingly looks like it could drag on for several years.

But they lit a blue touch paper in Moscow.

Ilgar Mammadov, President of the Russian Fencing Federation, was typical of those criticising Sir Craig. 

"Reedie creates public opinion so that we are not allowed to the Games," Mammadov told Russia’s official state news agency TASS.

But then, of course, Sir Craig and Russia have form.

As the President of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), he is blamed in Moscow for the country being banned for four years - later cut to two by the Court of Arbitration for Sport - as a punishment for operating and then covering up a massive state-sponsored doping programme.

Under the ruling, official Russia teams were banned from last year’s re-arranged Olympics in Tokyo, as well as the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Russia is also barred from hosting World Championship events for two years and its anthem and flag is banned too.

This has all largely been ruled irrelevant by Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine which has led to Russia being ostracised far more than they ever for doping, but the outrage felt by the punishment imposed by Sir Craig’s WADA will not be forgotten quickly, which is why his most recent remarks were met with such aggression.

For the first time, in his recently published autobiography, Sir Craig has revealed quite how deep Russian anger ran, leaving him fearing for the safety of him and his family.

"I found that one day I had five members of the UK National Crime Agency in our house at Bridge of Weir, west of Glasgow, to check on all my communications equipment - PC, laptop, iPad, and mobile phone - plus a two-hour interview," he writes in Delivering London's Olympic Dream: A Long Life in Sport.

"I had never complained before about my involvement in sport, but that conviction was sorely tested when I was informed that one of the suspected hackers was the same GRU thug who had been identified as one of the two who was charged with the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury."

But Russian intelligence was not the only group with its eyes on Sir Craig. 

On the eve of the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, a report had been published by WADA which had investigated allegations by Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of the WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow, who in a series of articles in The New York Times had laid bare the level and sophistication of the Russian state’s involvement in helping its athletes take drugs and avoid being detected.

WADA had asked the IOC to consider whether it  should allow Russian athletes to compete at Rio 2016. In the end, the IOC left it to the International Federations, which each imposed different levels of sanctions.

It has always been suspected that the IOC under its President Thomas Bach did not appreciate the timing of the publication of the WADA report and would have preferred to have swept it under the carpet, at least until after Rio 2016.

Such was Bach’s determination to undermine Sir Craig that he orchestrated a campaign at the IOC Session in Rio de Janeiro. 

IOC members were passed notes by staff, some of which Reedie claimed, "were personal attacks on me".

He writes in his book, "This had all the appearance of an organised and pre-meditated campaign. This was rather confirmed by an accidental meeting in the men’s room at the coffee break when one of my [WADA] staff watched a senior member of the IOC management embrace the then President of the Russian Olympic Committee, Alexander Zhukov, with the words, ‘we did it, didn’t we?’"

It is a neat vignette of the IOC’s relationship with Putin’s Russia under Bach.

Before the doping scandal, Sir Craig’s only real contact with Putin had been meeting him on the eve of the IOC Session in Guatemala in 2007 when Sochi was bidding for the 2014 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.

At the start of the meeting, Putin had addressed Sir Craig in fluent English before switching to Russian. "At the end of almost 30 minutes, he changed back into English and said, ‘Mr Reedie, this is off the record, but could you tell me if Scotland is going to become independent?’ I was amazed that the second most powerful man in the world seemed so aware of what was then a modest political argument in a distant country."

Let’s hope that Putin does not try to extract revenge on Sir Craig, who as you would expect as former chairman of the British Olympic Association, is very much a unionist, by helping his beloved Scotland split from the rest of the United Kingdom…

Delivering London's Olympic Dream: A Long Life in Sport by Sir Craig Reedie is published by Fonthill Media and available by clicking here