Lying Lochte fully deserved to lose his main sponsors

The most accomplished of these outstanding athletes have amassed several medals over this and previous games. The finest of the group will almost certainly be deserved recipients of honours.

The British honours system has at times in recent years seemed a little too fast to reflect sudden popular demand by recognising huge but rapid sporting success rather than sustained achievement in an endeavour built over many years. It is sustained or career-long commitment to a good cause or line of work that should be reflected by the honours system.

But the precise appropriateness of bestowing any one honour is a minor quibble. The Olympics have been plagued by more serious issues, notably with regard to drug use.

The much greater attention to cheating is one of the reasons that a nation that is largely seen to be clean, the UK, came out ahead of countries that have been badly tainted by the wave of allegations, such as Russia and China.

The British media – notably BBC Panorama and the Sunday Times – were heroically to the fore in highlighting such abuses, and were sharply criticised for doing so.

But the episode involving the US swimmer Ryan Lochte has exposed an ugly underbelly of sport. He showed that he is not only a brilliant athlete but also an arrogant liar. His claim that he had been robbed at gunpoint would have been widely believed in the age before CCTV and done lasting damage to Brazil’s reputation. Lochte cynically played on a stereotype of the Brazilian criminal to cover for his own drunken excesses.

It is entirely fitting that he has lost all his major sponsors, in the same way that it was fitting that sponsors sued Lance Armstrong – the ultimate aggressive, lying sportsman.

Liars who make up assault claims, such as in sex offences trials, always deserve harsh penalties. And athletes who carefully lie while presenting themselves as heroes deserve ruin.