The "wrap", as the shroud for the 2012 Olympic stadium is known, was supposed to provide an opportunity to showcase London's penchant for artistic improvisation, spontaneity and all‑round coolness. Let's save money, the organisers and architects thought, and make it look like we're having fun by wrapping a strip of environmentally sustainable fabric around the outside of the steel struts and concrete buttresses, and then get someone to cover it with, well, some sort of design.

The gloss came off that little scheme when the wrap was quietly abandoned once cost-saving measures began. From a budget of more than £9bn, a feature that was potentially the principal visual symbol of the 2012 Olympics was dumped in order to save £7m. Then someone thought a bit harder, realised that the absence of a wrap would let the wind in, possibly blowing javelins and hammers towards the VIP seats, and found a way to subsidise it.

Dow Chemicals, the US-based multinational company which pays an estimated $25m a year to be one of the International Olympic Committee's 11 principal sponsors, agreed to stump up the extra cash necessary to encircle the stadium's structure with panels made of polyester and polyethylene. In return they secured the right to use the surfaces for advertising purposes until the eve of the Games. But then the toxic waste hit the fan.

In 1999 Dow bought Union Carbide, another chemicals giant, which had come to public attention 15 years earlier when a dilapidated plant belonging to its Indian subsidiary in Bhopal, a city of 1.7m people in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, exploded and filled the air with gases, principally methyl isocynate, an ingredient of pesticides. Some 3,000 people were killed in the first few weeks, many more have died in the years since then, and the death total directly attributable to the world's worst industrial disaster now stands at around 11,000 in the most conservative estimate (the true total may be over 20,000). Although the plant had been closed and the site sold, some Dow shareholders objected to the takeover on the grounds that the company would be damaged by association with such a terrible event.

That moment has now come. Despite Dow's claims that the Indian government accepted a $470m (£300m) payment in final settlement of any obligations, disinterested witnesses attest to a continuing tragedy and want the London Olympic organisers to sever links with a company that refuses, in their view, to meet its moral obligations.

Lorraine Close is a 29-year-old nurse from Glasgow who followed her studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine by spending six months in Bhopal this year, working in the Sambhavna clinic, which cares for people suffering as a result of contamination. "The mistake people make is by continuing to say that this is about an explosion in December 1984," she told me on Monday. "It's about contamination that's happening today."

Toxic sludge, she explained, was dumped in pits, on top of plastic sheets, in an attempt to cleanse it through evaporation. Instead the chemicals leached into the ground water. The pits and the sludge are still there, and the water is still used for drinking and washing by people for whom government supplies of water are unreliable.

"I've seen horrendous congenital defects in children: gross retardation and stunting, skin and respiratory conditions, endocrinology problems, unusual cancers," she said.

"People say they know the water tastes funny, they know it isn't doing them any good, but they don't have a choice. And absolutely nothing is being done. All Dow will say, over and over again, is that it's nothing to do with them."

Now she has set up a Change.org petition to persuade Sebastian Coe and his fellow members of the organising committee to abandon their support of Dow's position. So far 8,400 people have signed up to help persuade a company that declared a profit of $2.3bn last year to face up to its moral obligations. And here is a chance for the Olympic movement, normally so proud of its humanitarian principles, to make a real difference to the lives of those who continue to suffer the consequences of a tragedy created by simple human greed.

Sócrates, a true Corinthian

Garforth Town, it turns out, were not the only English team for which the late, great and much lamented Sócrates turned out. David Harrison, a long‑standing member and former chairman of Corinthian Casuals FC, called on Monday to say that he was part of a visit to São Paulo in 1988, during which the English amateurs played a past-and-present XI representing Corinthians Paulista, the club founded after a Brazilian tour by the original Corinthian FC in 1910. A former Corinthians Paulista hero who had just completed a season in Rio with Flamengo, Sócrates agreed to play the first 45 minutes in the white shirt of the Brazilian club (Corinthian FC's original colours) – alongside six other Brazilian internationals – and the second in the visitors' chocolate and pink (the colours of Casuals FC, retained after the merger in 1939). The match took place in the Pacaembu Stadium in front of a crowd of about 17,000 – impressive, if some way below the record of 71,000 – and was televised to a national audience. Sócrates scored the only goal of the first half before switching sides, and the match finished 1-0. I think we can accept Mr Harrison's claim that he remains the best player in the history of the Ryman League club.

Two-toned tribute

There are times when a minute's applause is more appropriate than a minute's silence, but the salute to Gary Speed before Saturday's rugby international in Cardiff demonstrated the perils of not making a clear distinction between the two. Half the 60,000 crowd bowed their heads in silence while the other half clapped their hands. Everybody acted with the best of intentions but no one could be sure they were doing the right thing and a precious moment was spoilt.

Rooney's fulsome apology

The Uefa people are going to love it, are they not, when England's representatives turn up in Nyon this week with a battery of lawyers to plead the case for cutting Wayne Rooney's three-match international ban. The Football Association's Adrian Bevington says a reduction would allow Rooney to play "a more fulsome part" in the tournament. Dictionary definition of fulsome: "excessive or insincere (archaic: disgusting, loathsome)".

richard.williams@theguardian.com