Not everyone is loving this summer of sport. My mother has spent the last month moaning at me about the fact that football and Wimbledon have displaced her favourite quiz shows from the TV schedules. So I’m loath to tell her that, come the end of the month, the Olympics begin and the schedules will be cleared once more.

Radio 4 offered up an Olympic aperitif this week, with Mike Costello looking at the history of the 100m final over the years. In five brisk programmes (each 15 minutes long) stretched across Monday to Friday (also available on BBC Sounds), the veteran athletics commentator recalled five of the most memorable races stretching back to 1980.

Memorable not always for the right reasons, it should be said. The Olympics never take place in isolation. The fact is sport and politics always mix.

So it was in 1980 at the Moscow Olympics. That summer the Americans boycotted the Games because of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. There was huge pressure on the British athletes to do likewise. The Scottish 100m hopeful Allan Wells came under direct pressure from Margaret Thatcher’s government not to go.

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“Margo and I were getting letters from 10 Downing Street … saying we dinnae want you to go,” Wells told Costello some 44 years later (Margo being Wells's wife and coach). But in the end they pushed too hard. One letter included a picture of a dead Afghan child. That was a step too far for Wells and he was determined to take part after receiving it.

As a result, he would become the first British athlete to win the 100m since 1924. But maybe the real victory came two weeks later when he raced the American athletes who had boycotted the games and beat them too.

Costello’s show was a reminder of the preeminence of the 100m race. And the controversies that can often surround it. On Tuesday he recounted the story of “the dirtiest race in history” when the Jamaican-born Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson beat American Carl Lewis in the 1988 event in Seoul, only to be found guilty of doping the next day.

In Canada the newspaper headlines changed from ‘Canadian wins gold medal’ to ‘Jamaican athlete disqualified’, one of the contributors pointed out wryly.

In fact, six of the eight athletes who lined up that day would be linked with performance-enhancing drugs at some point in their careers, including Lewis who, it would emerge much later, failed three drugs tests at the 1988 Olympic trials, though he was cleared of any intentional wrongdoing.

At least Costello had a more uplifting story to tell on Friday when he revisited the 2008 Olympics in Beijing when Usain Bolt became the fastest man alive on a diet of chicken nuggets.

At one point in that race, Costello pointed out, Bolt was travelling at a speed of 27 miles an hour (though presumably even Bolt couldn’t keep that up for 60 minutes). The Jamaican athlete started celebrating before he crossed the finishing line, but still clocked a time of 9.69 seconds.

Some 16 years on Bolt can be found advertising Persil washing powder.

OasisOasis (Image: free)

Also on BBC Sounds this week a new podcast presented by Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq charting the rise and fall of Oasis dropped.

The eight part series, which dipped greedily into the BBC’s archive, retold the band’s story in exhaustive, exhausting detail, from youthful bravado to boastful, boorish arrogance.

How much you get from it may depend on how big a fan you are, I suspect.

I can’t say I am. The result feels a bit tabloid, and at times a bit navel-gazing. And the story ultimately - inevitably - descends into little more than sibling bitchiness to be honest.

Still, it also reminds you that for all their failings - Liam’s ability to start a fight in an empty sock drawer and Noel’s increasingly grumpy old dad act - they are both often amusing company.

In the last episode, whilst discussing the band’s break-up with Liam, Whiley suggested that the singer hadn’t done much wrong in the circumstances. “Not as much as I normally did,” Liam agreed, before pointing out, “We’re a rock and roll band. We’re not the Tweenies.”

They were never grown up enough to be mistaken for the Tweenies, to be fair.

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Screenshot, Radio 4, Friday, July 19

Radio 4’s film series continues with Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones celebrating the 35th anniversary of the release of Spike Lee’s incendiary movie Do The Right Thing, which, safe to say, has a better soundtrack than anything Oasis recorded.