The absurdity as well as the diplomatic idiocy of this gimmick is obvious. The EU – as any of its bureaucrats will proudly drawl – is not a country, it’s a bloc, and the Olympics does not award medals to blocs, much as Fifa does not.

But the truly amusing irony is that this ghastly competitor tops the chart largely because of the incredible medal haul of Britain, the very country it is currently absorbed in shaming and punishing for its rankly disobedient vote in June to leave the EU.

While this reading of Olympics victory is amusing, mainly for its whiff of "sore losers", its underlying impulse is far more sobering. For it is the perfect manifestation of an attitude which is just as common among the consultants, PR men and apparatchiks who surround the EU's institutions as among those within it – an obsession with with conformism, and a visceral distrust of individualism.