In modern times sport and politics have become uneasy bed fellows, locked in the same embrace yet anxious to proclaim their individuality.

When times are good politicians are happy to cosy up to athletes and bask in the reflected glory but when things get ugly it can be a little more complicated - as this week's Scotland-Qatar match, marred by human rights abuses in the Gulf state, prove.

Take the example of President Nelson Mandela and the game of rugby football. For many South Africans this was the game of the white population yet Mandela instinctively recognised that the cause of national reconciliation would be helped if he allied himself with the winning Springbok team in the 1995 rugby World Cup, when he was president. It was a high risk move because rugby was played almost exclusively by the white population and seemed to represent the divisiveness of the apartheid regime but it worked triumphantly.

That gave the tournament another edge because during the 1960s and 1970s South African sport had been subjected to a number of international boycotts as a means of protesting against the practice of segregation. South Africa was formally expelled from the International Olympics Committee in 1970 after refusing to send fully integrated teams to the previous games in 1964 and 1968. It is generally agreed that the boycotts, especially those of rugby and cricket tours, hastened the end of apartheid in the early 1990s.

By then sport's influence over politics had been made clear by another extremist regime when the Nazis attempted to suborn the 1936 Olympic Games to promote their own racist ideology. For the German leader Adolf Hitler this seemed to be an ideal opportunity to promote the theory of Aryan racial superiority and the alleged feebleness of other races. Although Germany did top the medals table the Nazi theory was destroyed by the superb performance of the black US athlete Jesse Owens who won the two sprint gold medals as well as the long jump in which third place went to the Japanese athlete Naoto Tajima.

Given the Olympics' status which grew in the post-war world as a result of increased media interest, especially television, it was not surprising that the Games remained centre-stage. It was the scene for a famous civil rights protest in Mexico City in 1968 when US medal winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the clenched-fist Black Power salute at the medal ceremony following their wins in the 200 metres. Twelve years later the US led a boycott of the 1980s Olympics in Moscow as a protest against the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union and at the following Games in 1984 the Soviets responded with a retaliatory boycott involving 15 Soviet bloc countries. It was all getting rather silly and out of order.

On the other hand there have been occasions when sport was used as a proxy by countries which found themselves involved in more serious confrontations. The best known and perhaps most infamous incident came in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne when the Hungarian and Soviet water polo teams came to blows in what became known as the "Blood in the Water" match. It was played in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary following a popular uprising and Hungarian passions were running high. "We felt we were playing not just for ourselves but for our whole country," explained the Hungarian captain Ervin Zádor after the match in which blows had been exchanged and blood had been spilled.

There was a similar confrontation in 1969 during the World Ice Hockey Championships in Stockholm when the Czechoslovak team beat the Soviet Union in a highly charged game in the aftermath of the Prague Spring and the consequent Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. This sparked riots in Prague and the incident was later called the "Cold War on Ice". Unsurprisingly given its popularity the "beautiful game" of football has not been immune from the politicisation of sport. In the 1986 World Cup in Mexico four years after the Falklands War there were tensions when England played Argentina and these were not helped when the Argentine player Diego Maradona used his hand to score an illegal goal but that was as nothing compared to the infamous "Football War" which took place between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969.

During the qualifying rounds for the following year's World Cup the national teams played home and away games at a time of increasing political tension between the two countries. Both games were marred by rioting followed by extreme violence and in an atmosphere of growing hysteria Salvadoran forces launched a major offensive against their neighbour. All-out war was averted by the intervention of the Organisation of American States but thousands of Hondurans were displaced by the fighting and there were heavy casualties on both sides. Although the conflict had deeper economic causes the actual fighting was sparked by two games of football.