IT seems almost ludicrously superfluous to be writing about sports when the world really is on the brink of new nuclear war, as George Kerevan’s perspicacious column in yesterday’s National demonstrated.

This feeling of the dreadful uselessness of sport is a theme I have been developing for some time now, but never more so that when I heard President Donald Trump saying that America’s response to North Korea’s belligerence is “locked and loaded.” The phrase locked and loaded – ready to fire – was popularised by none other than John Wayne in the film Sands of Iwo Jima and, let’s face it, Trump and Wayne both have something in common when it comes to military action – for different reasons: they both managed to avoid battle in the service of their country. That’s why Trump is nothing but a willie waver, as George Kerevan put it.

We are also living in a United Kingdom where the vast amounts being broadcast and written about Brexit, and the Tory government’s seeming obsession with the subject, are a deflection tactic. The Brexit noise is disguising the fact that, on behalf of rich capitalists, the Conservative Party is dismantling much of what makes the UK worthwhile – the NHS, the welfare state and the basic tolerance which is the byword of so many people on these islands. That’s why we Scots need out of it… In this odious task the Tory right are being aided and abetted by the discognoscenti and the unintelligentsia of the mainstream media who are too salary-enslaved to their masters’ grotesquely self-serving world-view even to hint at the truth, as they prey on mainly English but also, sadly, some Scottish, igno-arrogance, as I call it, to spread fear, distrust and hatred.

Then you watch the world athletics championships and suddenly you see why sport is so important and can teach us a great deal about the real Britain, the real Planet Earth.

I suppose like every other person watching the 4x100m Men’s final I was dismayed to see Usain Bolt go to the well once too often and pull up injured (I’ll write about him when he does actually retire). For what it’s worth, I don’t think the great man could have retrieved the situation for Jamaica as his team-mates had left him too much to do.

So the final few seconds of the race saw Team GB & NI thrillingly pip the US to win the gold medals, the first-ever for the British and Northern Irish 100m relay squad at the Worlds. As a supporter of Team GB & NI until such times as Team Scotland competes in its own right, I was utterly delighted. (Noticed the BBC commentators were often careful to call it Team Great Britain and Northern Ireland – can’t upset the DUP now they’re in the licence fee-approving Government, can we?) What delighted me even more was that the victory was achieved even as the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was descending into murder and mayhem, with Donald Trump unable to outrightly condemn the perpetrators because he might lose a vote or two.

I looked at the faces of the eight men who had competed for Team USA and Team GB & NI, and at the faces of the eight women who had competed for the same two teams in the 4x100m women’s relay. I very much hope it will not be seen as racist to point out that it was a fair assumption that every one of those 16 athletes was descended from immigrants to the US and the UK. And so they were. Let’s take the four men of Team GB & NI. Danny Talbot’s mother is half Trinidadian, Adam Gemili is the son of an Iranian father and Moroccan mother, CJ Ujah’s family hail from Nigeria and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake’s family is Jamaican.

Yet there they were, winning for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, while four African-American women won for the US. All eight of them showed what teamwork and cooperation can do, so what a marvellous riposte it was to the Charlottesville racists, in the vein of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Every one of us living in these islands is a mongrel, the product of diverse racial influences dating back thousands of years. There is no such thing as pure Scottish, Welsh, Irish or English – not unless there are some 10,000-year-old druids hiding somewhere. No, everyone born on these islands is the product of DNA that was mingled when our ancestors came here, no matter when that was.

Sir Mohamed Farah was not born here. He is an immigrant from Somalia who won one third of Team GB & NI’s medals – does anyone doubt his Britishness, or question his commitment to his adopted home?

Yet I have no doubt there are Neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the UK and the US who would disown the achievements of Farah and all sportspeople of colour, whether they be immigrants or descendants of immigrants. That’s why sport must stand up them.

If sport means anything, it means playing by the rules, admiring winners, sympathising with the losers but above all participating in activities that improve the human species, not binding it in chains of poverty, servility, racial hatred and ignorance as so many of our leaders want to do.

And if we are doomed to contemplate nuclear holocaust, let’s get rid of those leaders who risk it, and allow the rest of us a sporting chance to run, jump, throw, vault, compete, spectate – and live.