It is a finely-balanced – and topical – question in the present economic climate.

 

On the one hand, the right to associate your name with a prestige project, such as an Olympic Games, has to be worth something, even today.

 

And if fully-priced work is hard to find, there might be something to be said for giving talented employees a worthwhile task to sink their teeth into while waiting for commercial demand for their services to recover.

 

On the other, is there really a case for treating the Olympics differently to any other brand?

 

You could argue that service providers derive just as much benefit from positive name association with a well-known blue-chip company while also receiving the going rate for the work they do.

 

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the argument, I’d say that business conditions are so tough at the moment, and cash so hard to come by, that Big Sport is going to have to get used to paying for some of the things it has grown accustomed to securing from sponsors – often with a fat cheque attached into the bargain.

 

Take cars.

 

While I still can’t really believe London 2012 will end up (like the rest of us) purchasing its temporary car transport requirements from a Hertz or an Avis, there is equally no doubting the desperate straits in which the car manufacturing industry now finds itself.

 

And how hard must it be to justify splashing out on a prestige sponsorship when you are looking to Governments to bail you out with state aid?

 

I was glad recently to receive a knowledgeable appraisal of the pressures affecting the sports sponsorship market from a man with more than 30 years’ experience in sports marketing - John Perera (pictured), commercial director of the England and Wales Cricket Board.

 

Sponsorship, he argued (as the domestic season got damply under way at Lord’s with the traditional match between MCC and the champion county) is now part of marketing.

 

That means that when prospective sponsors see declines of 20-30 percent in spot advertising rates -- as he said they were at present – they start to argue that “sponsorship should fall into that category”.

 

“There will be some readjustments of values,” Perera went on.

 

“Governing bodies like ourselves have got to be realistic now as to values which we are prepared to go to market on.

 

“It will shake out quite a lot of the good and the bad I think.”

 

He thinks cricket’s “downturn in values” may weigh in at “between 10 and 15 percent”.

 

“We believe we have got a good product and there are lots of attractions to sponsors,” he said.

 

“I think some of the other sports will suffer more.”

 

The better news for sport is that the fundamental value of sponsorship as a device that can deliver for brands across a very wide range of fronts is well appreciated.

 

”What sponsorship does is it transcends media,” Perera argued.

 

“Unless you spend shed-loads of money, you can’t, as a media buyer or an advertiser, get on TV, radio, online, news coverage, back-page sports coverage, photographic coverage, blogs, you name it.

 

“That’s what sport does.”

 

As long as sports sponsorship retains this ability to generate broad-based brand exposure, there is a good chance the present downturn will be only temporary.

 

In the meantime, as an end-user of some of the services sports event providers lay on, I have to say I can foresee circumstances in which a ratcheting back of sponsorship is not necessarily all bad news.

 

In Athens for the 2004 Olympics, I was contemplating ingesting yet another leaden cheese pie in the media café of one of the venues when a veteran broadcaster, evidently finding himself in the same boat, finally cracked.

 

“Ahhh”, he sighed despairingly. “In Moscow [the 1980 Games host] they gave us caviar vol-au-vents.”

 

● Even in today’s spin-conscious age, it is relatively rare to be sent a press release that prompts you to laugh out loud.

 

It happened a few weeks ago with the headline: ‘Rio 2016 reinforces its green credentials and Governmental support for the bid at launch of new sewage treatment plant’.

 

I thought that was trying a little too hard.

 

And it happened again last week – although this time the laughter was of the hollow variety.

 

The announcement that “green-fingered Brits will have the chance to help design a Great British Garden on the London 2012 Olympic Park” took me back to a murky Tuesday morning two years ago.

 

This was the morning I spent visiting just such a Great British Garden on the London 2012 Olympic Park, in the shape of the Manor Garden Allotments.

 

As I wrote at the time: “This near century-old patchwork of vegetable gardens exudes an air of tranquility and quiet industry that is somehow both quintessentially British and rare beyond measure in 21st-century London.”

 

So why do we need another Great British Garden?

 

 

Because in what to me was little short of an act of officially-sanctioned vandalism, the original Manor Garden Allotments have been swept away, yes, to make way for the Olympic development.

 

So exercised was I by the press release that I headed out to the temporary replacement site in Leyton, East London, to see how the Manor Garden allotment-holders were making out.

 

The one-line summary is: they are getting on as best they can.

 

As Mark Harton, chairman of the Manor Garden Society and allotment-holder, told me, broad beans and purple-sprouting broccoli have done well at the new site, but early bulbs struggle.

 

Meanwhile, conditions in more than a third of the 63 plots have so far proved so challenging as to make it difficult to grow anything of very much at all.

 

Attempts are being made to remedy the situation, but in the meantime, Reg Hawkins, a septuagenarian former graphic artist, whose plot is at the difficult end of the site and whom I had also spoken to in 2007, made little effort to hide his frustration.

 

“It was like moving out of Buckingham Palace into a blooming ramshackle shed,” he said.

 

I need scarcely add that the new site, behind a green metal fence at one end of a grassy public space, has none of the charm of the original.

 

For one thing, allotment-holders have each been provided with identical green wooden sheds.

 

On the old site, nearly every plot had its own character, accreted over many years.

 

This might all seem of little significance in the grand scheme of things, but to me it epitomises the high-handed extravagance that I find one of the Olympic Movement’s least appealing traits.

 

It was deemed impossible to let the much-cherished original allotments remain, so instead significant sums are being spent to flatten them; to evacuate those affected to this temporary site; to move them back to the Olympic Park once the party is over; and, presumably, to fund this latest breathtakingly insensitive scheme.

 

“Blooming marvellous”, said the press release.

 

Blooming ridiculous, say I.

 

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year's Beijing Olympics