While the latest outbreak of jitters in the global banking sector could yet have unpredictable consequences for international sports bodies, I would think that events in the Russian capital exerted a more urgent pull on the attention of International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach and his colleagues.

Diplomacy by Xi currently looks one of the better bets for pausing the conflict in Ukraine in time to prevent it casting an almighty shadow over next year’s Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, the first in the French capital for exactly a century and very likely the last under Bach’s leadership.

Seemingly unchallenged at home, and keen to reignite China’s economy after the traumas of COVID, Xi appears to be prioritising international affairs at present, perhaps encouraged by plaudits China has received for recently brokering a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The Chinese leader arrived at the Kremlin to partake of a six-course meal featuring quail and mushroom crêpes and pomegranate sorbet with a Ukraine peace plan in his pocket.

And while the number one priority for the high-profile visit to the fief of his fellow strongman-leader Vladimir Putin, is sure to be a deepening of bilateral ties, many in the Olympic world must desperately be hoping that the Ukraine plan will gain traction.

In the absence of a ceasefire and substantive discussions in the relatively near future, it seems almost unthinkable that both Russian and Ukrainian athletes would compete at Paris.

Either Russians would be present, presumably in neutral guise, triggering a highly probable Ukrainian boycott and creating a public relations disaster - at least in the West - for the IOC - or they would somehow be kept out, ensuring Ukraine’s presence, but fracturing the international sports movement for years to come.

In monitoring yesterday’s media coverage of Xi’s arrival in Moscow, a familiar name jumped out at me. According to the New York Times’s woman on the spot Valerie Hopkins, the Chinese leader was met at Vnukovo airport by “Russia’s deputy prime minister for tourism, sport, culture and communications, Dmitri N. Chernyshenko”.

As many readers will recall, Chernyshenko was once a key figure in Olympic circles as President and chief executive of the 2014 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi.

My abiding memory of him dates from September 2013, just after Bach’s election as IOC President, when he startled a number of us milling around the lobby of the Buenos Aires Hilton by hurrying across that rarefied space looking for Bach and brandishing a mobile phone on the other end of which was thought to be Putin.

One can read too much into such things, but Chernyshenko’s presence at the airport to meet Xi made me wonder whether specifically sports-related issues might also find their way onto the agenda of this week’s Sino-Russian meetings.

One candidate would be a proposal floated recently by Russian Sports Minister Oleg Matytsin that Russia hosts the first Games involving countries which are part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

The SCO, a political, economic, international security and defence organisation, includes the world’s two most populous nations - China and India - as well as Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Iran is in the process of joining - other nations, including Belarus, hold the status of observers.

I cannot imagine, in present circumstances, that Olympic leaders would regard the vigorous pursuit of such a Games project with any great enthusiasm.

If so, then one pressure-point that Lausanne might be able over time to leverage is the desire of India, China’s increasingly vibrant and self-confident South Asian rival, to host the Olympic Games.

As this week’s meetings will underline, Russia’s vast energy resources make it almost impossible to isolate - Russian gas that will not now be consumed by Europe will be snapped up gladly by China and others.

Mutual mistrust of the United States provides another potentially powerful motor for strengthening the alliance of convenience between Beijing and Moscow, just as it did in the early Cold War years of the 1950s.

Sport played a part in disrupting that alliance, with so-called ping-pong diplomacy paving the way for US President Richard Nixon’s ice-breaking visit to Beijing in 1972.

If the SCO Games idea takes off, then sport may equally play a part in restoring these old authoritarian friends and neighbours to something approaching their former closeness.