Proxy battles by the US and Russia are taking sport back to the 1930s | Richard Williams

On the face of it, Lindsey Vonn looks like Donald Trump’s type. Tall, blond, blue-eyed and a former star – naked but for a coat of paint – of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, the champion skier is the epitome of what would once have been called an all-American girl. And she will be one of the main draws of February’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, hoping to repeat her 2010 Olympic downhill win in Vancouver and thus take a measure of solace for her absence through injury in Sochi four years ago.

Coming off a 2016-17 season also compromised by injury, Vonn currently races in the shadow of her compatriot Mikaela Shiffrin, the 22-year-old phenomenon who won the Olympic slalom title in the mountains above Vladimir Putin’s favourite resort four years ago. But Vonn is the one who guest-starred in an episode of Law and Order and who dated Tiger Woods for a couple of years after their respective divorces. She remains the face of the United States’ powerful alpine skiing team.

In normal times, she would not be the kind of sports star whom you would expect to hear criticising her country’s commander-in-chief. But she made a striking response this week when asked by CNN how she would feel about representing a country whose president is Donald Trump.

“I hope to represent the people of the United States, not the president,” she said. “I take the Olympics very seriously and what they mean and what they represent, what walking under our flag means in opening ceremonies. I want to represent our country well, and I don’t think there are a lot of people currently in our government who do that.”

Would she accept an invitation to the White House? “Absolutely not. No. But I have to win to be invited, so … No, actually, I think every US team member is invited – so, no, I won’t go.”

Clearly we are not in normal times. Vonn was unspecific about the basis of her disagreement with Trump – it could have been Colin Kaepernick and the take-a-knee protests, it could have been the president’s description of neo‑fascists as “some very fine people”, it could have been his campaign to take from the poor and give to the rich, or it could have been his “grab ’em by the pussy” remark that swung it – but whatever it was turned her into a player in a complex game in which politics and sport have once again become deeply entangled.

The 2014 Winter Games was Putin’s £40bn project. Like the macho-man calendars and the annexation of Crimea, it was aimed at boosting the president’s popularity rating among his people. The need for competitors representing Russia to emerge in guaranteed triumph from Sochi required the creation of the system of doping – already in place by London 2012 – that, once some brave whistleblowers had revealed its scale, brought about the ban announced this week.

At the top of the doping system was Vitaly Mutko, then Russia’s sports minister and now one of the country’s deputy prime ministers. This week the International Olympic Committee banned Mutko from all future involvement with the Olympics. But he remains in place as one of Putin’s close associates, and also as president of the Russian football association and of the 2018 World Cup organising committee.

As David Conn revealed in the Guardian this week, Fifa had undertaken an investigation of Mutko for his alleged role in covering up the positive test of at least one foreign footballer playing in Russia when the chairmen of the ethics committee and of that committee’s sanctioning body were summarily removed from their posts without explanation. Another casualty was the chairman of the governance committee, who claimed that Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, had also been under investigation for, inter alia, interfering with a decision to prevent Mutko from joining the body’s main council.

The IOC’s decision, along with its ban on athletes from competing in Pyeongchang under the Russian flag, has not been allowed to alter Fifa’s benign attitude to Mutko, or Mutko’s attitude to his own role in the coming festival of football. “Everyone must understand,” he said, “that the world of sport is not just the Olympic Games.”

Indeed it is not. The world of sport now includes competitions involving teams from the Kremlin and the White House and from a variety of bodies involved in proxy contests. When Trump announced this week that the US would be recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, he strayed into waters whose treacherous tides briefly threatened to drown the organisers of the Giro d’Italia a few days earlier.

Unveiling the route of the 2018 Giro – including the first three stages in Israel – the organisers used the term “West Jerusalem” in reference to the location of the opening time trial. Although historically accurate and reflecting the United Nations’ refusal to recognise the post-1967 occupied territories, this created a furore, including a threatened withdrawal of support by the Israeli government’s sports and tourism ministers, that forced the organisers to climb down, no doubt mindful of the €20m they are said to be receiving from an Israeli businessman as a hosting fee.

An initial announcement in September, in which the organisers had simply referred to “Jerusalem”, drew criticism from the European Co-ordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine. “The Giro deceptively portrays occupied East Jerusalem as part of Israel and as its unified capital,” it said. “No country in the world recognises any part of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.” It does now, thanks to Trump.

No doubt the Giro will start on time next May, amid a few protests. And six weeks later the players of Brazil, France, Spain, Argentina and other countries will produce football to make us sigh with pleasure. But everything else about the World Cup finals – the strident ceremonies, the sneering denials, the odious self-congratulation, the feeling that too much money was at stake to persuade Fifa to do anything about Mutko – is guaranteed to make us yearn for a time when sport seemed to offer an escape from, rather than a reflection of, the ills of the world.

This is starting to feel like the worst time since the late 1930s, when England’s footballers complied with the FA’s request to perform the Hitler salute before a friendly in Germany and Jewish athletes from several nations boycotted the Olympics in protest against the Nazis. And it was Berlin in 1936 where the bellicose patriotism of modern international sport made its bow. That, or pretty close to it, is where we are at now.