Later in the week, at an event that was controversial for other reasons, Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, managed to crowbar a reference to the Olympic spirit into a speech on gay marriage.
The Principle Six campaign uses the language of the charter to give athletes and fans a way to speak out against discrimination before and during the Sochi Olympics without breaking Russian anti-gay laws or violating the Olympic ban on political speech".
At the Olympic Games he gave speeches on any subject anyone proposed, and like Gorgias, answered any question anyone put to him (Lesser Hippias 363c), and in the same dialogue (346a) he says that since he began competing (agōnizesthai) at the games he has never been beaten.
That, I suppose, is why Boris got such a big hand from the public for his valedictory speech at the Olympic parade.
Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, a private group based in New York, said he and other rights advocates had been skeptical that China would fulfill its pledge to allow greater free speech during the Olympic Games.
David Cameron's speech at the Olympic velodrome in February, in which he urged the rest of Britain to tell their Scottish friends to keep the Union, was, she says, "such a bad move.
It was in the tarot cards of those bulimic, retarded royal occasions – jubilee, wedding, babies; in the sickly nostalgia of The King's Speech; in the Olympic Games and Boris's parachute – like Ukip on bad acid.
Here's the full text of Miliband's December speech, which cites Olympic diversity as proof of the positive story Britain has to tell about assimilation and diversity, far better than some of our neighbours in my experience, but also admitting that New Labour let in more workers faster "than some of our communities could adapt".
They saw the video of a man publicly attacking me at my speech in Seoul Olympic Stadium in front of 100,000 people.
Mr. Putin did win praise for giving a speech in English to Olympic officials in 2007, a tactic that was believed to have helped Russia win the right to host the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014.
