This was a considerable improvement on Imagine’s last prominent public outing. In March 2020, Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot decided to cheer up everybody on lockdown by asking 26 of her celebrity pals to film themselves singing a line, irrespective of their ability to hold a tune. The a cappella montage did at least provide the most terrifying phase of the pandemic with a shared moment of unintentional hilarity and a lasting monument to the hubris of well-meaning celebrities with nothing to do. One guilty participant, the actor Chris O’Dowd, put it down to “that first wave of creative diarrhoea that seemed to encase the entire world”. Of course, Gadot had to choose Imagine.

Imagine, which turns 50 in September, occupies a unique place in our culture. When the song’s producer, Phil Spector, first heard it, he thought it was “like the national anthem”; but like Spector’s reputation, that assessment has proved complicated to say the least. While some regard it as beautiful and profound, or at least unifyingly inoffensive, others damn it as a sanctimonious monstrosity. It was voted the UK’s favourite song lyric in 1999, the best single of all time in 2001, and the greatest song ever in 2004. Yet it has also been named as the worst song in the world so often that to despise it has become a cliché. “I am hardly the first writer to dislike Imagine,” wrote the critic Tom Ewing. “In fact, the laurels on the comment thread are likely to go to anyone who can make a really good case for its beauty, wisdom or excellence.” This cannot be put down to just its chronic overfamiliarity. Other played-to-death songs such as Hey Jude or Bohemian Rhapsody aren’t nearly as divisive. So what is it about Imagine that drives so many people crazy?

It is annoying that Imagine has been used to caricature a painfully complicated man as a gentle saint, so it’s essential to understand where Lennon’s head was at when he recorded the song in his home studio in Tittenhurst Park, Berkshire in May 1971. His experience of Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy had enabled him to let go of the “father-figure trip”, he said. “Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.” At the same time, Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were in the throes of political radicalisation.

In 1968, he had written the Beatles’ Revolution, which told the counterculture to steady on there and drop the pictures of Mao. By the end of 1970, he was telling Rolling Stone: “I really thought that love will save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at.” Shortly after an interview with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn for the Trotskyist magazine Red Mole in January 1971, he wrote a new song based on their conversation. Combining socialism and feminism with a Black Panther slogan, Power to the People flipped the ambivalent opening line of Revolution into a call to arms: “Say you want a revolution/ We better get on right away.” The US New Left magazine Ramparts republished the interview under the headline “The Working Class Hero Turns Red”.

Lennon saw Imagine as a different kind of revolution. The black comedian and activist Dick Gregory had given him a book of positive prayer, which Lennon explained to Playboy in 1980 like so: “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion — not without religion but without this my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing — then it can be true.” Imagine, therefore, is protest rewritten as a secular prayer. The idea chimed with Ono’s “instruction paintings”, collected in her 1964 book Grapefruit, each of which began “Imagine…” Lennon later said that Imagine should have been credited to Lennon/Ono because “it was right out of Grapefruit” and her name was finally added in 2017.

The Yoko factor turns a lot of people off. While a song like Working Class Hero draws its political power from Lennon’s distinctive flinty sarcasm, Imagine is driven by Ono’s utopian whimsicality. It’s of a piece with the couple’s subsequent billboard campaign, “War is over! If you want it.” The idea that you can simply will a better world into being can seem like impotent New Age guff but the New Left’s philosopher-in-chief Herbert Marcuse was then arguing that imagining radical change was the essential first step towards realising it. The critic Robert Christgau acutely observed that Imagine was “both a hymn for the Movement and a love song for his wife, celebrating a Yokoism and a Marcusianism simultaneously”.

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People who find Imagine about as deep as a Keep Calm and Carry On poster might be surprised by how seriously contemporary critics took it, but it is a startlingly radical lyric wrapped in a musical comfort blanket. Running from the myth of Beatle John, Lennon was desperate to shed every form of baggage, and Imagine magnifies this process of renunciation to global proportions. Like Gimme Some Truth, God or Give Peace a Chance, it is a list of things to reject. The first verse scraps heaven and hell; the second bins nations, religions and war; and the third abolishes possessions and poverty.

As the chorus acknowledges (“You may say I’m a dreamer”), that’s a lot for one song to ask for. Its haters are divided between those who consider this prospectus anodyne drivel and those who find its picture of a godless, classless, borderless world “a vision of hell”, as one writer put it. Lennon told the NME that it was “anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I’m not particularly a Communist and I do not belong to any movement”. He preferred “a nice British socialism” to “the way some daft Russian might do it”.

“Imagine no religion” angered the kind of people who had still not forgiven Lennon for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus but it was “Imagine no possessions” that became the main bone of contention. “Was it a millionaire who said imagine no possessions?” sang Elvis Costello in his 1991 single The Other Side of Summer. Lennon himself realised that he’d misjudged the next line, tweaking the inadvertently condescending “I wonder if you can” to “I wonder if we can” in at least one performance.

The visuals don’t help his case. Lennon decided to film the making of the album and a clip from the movie — John playing his white baby grand piano in his big white mansion — became the music video for Imagine. He should have anticipated that this tableau of smug luxury would sit uneasily with the third verse, but to be fair to him, he was at the time very happy to play benefit concerts and give money to all kinds of causes, including two of the Chicago Seven defendants, Biafran refugees and Clydeside shipbuilders, one of whom misheard the name of the donor and shouted out, “But Lenin’s dead!”

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I’m not convinced that it’s inherently hypocritical for a rich man to imagine a different world, given that anyone who has a big enough platform to spread such a message is almost inevitably wealthy. Still, one has to love the card that Elton John sent to the couple at their extravagant home in Manhattan’s Dakota Building: “Imagine six apartments/ It isn’t hard to do/ One is full of fur coats/ Another’s full of shoes.”

By the time they moved into the Dakota in 1973, Lennon’s revolutionary phase had flamed out. Lennon biographer John Wiener argues that Imagine “seemed to many movement people a hymn to the New Left in defeat”. Not long after the hot mess of Lennon’s 1972 protest album Some Time in New York City, Richard Nixon won reelection in a landslide and Lennon made a brisk, bitter retreat from politics. The FBI, which had been monitoring him as a potentially dangerous radical, closed its file.

It seems remarkable now that when it was released as a single in the US, Imagine hung around the charts for no longer than Power to the People had done and was outperformed by Paul McCartney’s amiable Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. It didn’t come out in the UK until 1975, when it peaked at number six. McCartney angered his estranged friend by telling Melody Maker that he liked Imagine because it wasn’t as political as John’s recent stuff. Lennon shot back with a furious letter: “So you think Imagine ain’t political? It’s Working Class Hero with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself!! You obviously didn’t dig the words. Imagine!”

It’s the sugar that makes the song so portable. It may have the most comprehensive agenda of any hit single ever made but Imagine sounds modest, tentative and unassuming. On a compositional level, it is almost childishly simple. (You can hear an instrumental scrap of it, called John’s Piano Piece, in outtakes from the Beatles’ 1969 Let It Be sessions.) The basic track was recorded in less than half an hour (they used the second of three takes) and the subsequent string arrangement was extraordinarily restrained for a Spector production. The Tokyo version, orchestrated by Hans Zimmer, is far too grandiose; a thought experiment should not be oversold.

Imagine, therefore, lends itself to occasions when something hopeful but not overbearing is required. After Lennon was murdered in 1980, the song topped the UK charts for four weeks but its suitability for mourning is much broader than that. Stevie Wonder performed it in 1996 in honour of the victims of a terrorist bombing during the games, Neil Young reached for it at a 9/11 tribute concert and Madonna chose it to remember those who died in the 2004 tsunami. As Slate’s Katy Waldman wrote when it again became a song of grieving after the assault on the Bataclan in Paris in 2015, “No one who has just watched footage of families mourning their loved ones in the wake of a terrorist attack is ready to swallow a dose of unalloyed affirmation. The song seems veined with the sad understanding that its own dream is too simple.”

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Yet at the same time, Imagine still carries enough of a residual political charge to have been banned by the BBC during the first Gulf War and (briefly) by the US radio network Clear Channel after 9/11. At the end of 2001, Rolling Stone called it “a new national hymn, a strong, quiet counterweight to the institutional psalms and fight songs… that have filled the air since the terrorist attacks.” Former President Jimmy Carter told NPR that on his travels around the world, he heard it “used almost equally with national anthems”.

Imagine is rather like a tourist attraction in your hometown: you’re so used to seeing it in the background that you forget why it’s remarkable. To be honest, I need never hear it again but I’ve warmed to it in recent years precisely because its naked idealism is so very uncool and so easy to deride. There has never been a song like it and it would take a supernatural blend of talent, ego and idealism for anyone to even attempt one. Can you imagine what Twitter would do if, say, Chris Martin tried it?

Unless I am seriously underestimating the global appetite for utopian socialism, most listeners are not embracing it on a literal level as a time-capsule of Lennon and Ono’s post-Sixties art-school radicalism. As Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello has said, “If people really believed the sentiments John Lennon expressed in that song, we would have had revolution in this country a long time ago.” It has become instead a generous vessel for all kinds of aspirations, both big and small. Three years ago, the Observer asked Ono what the word “imagine” meant to her and she replied simply: “To think of something to hope for.” You may say I’m a sucker but I find that idea hard to hate.

The last called-off Games were those of 1940 (slated first for Tokyo and then for Helsinki) and 1944 (notionally awarded to London). When peace returned, the world was in ruins. It’s hard to imagine today the ubiquitous desolation and destitution — although perhaps that will soon become easier.

London, still scarred by the Blitz, agreed to host the first post-war Summer Olympics in 1948. Some Britons decried the waste of resources. Yet the Austerity Olympics, as they came to be known, were a triumph. There was no grandiosity, no razzmatazz; no money. Two weeks before the Games began, the main stadium, Wembley, was still being used for greyhound racing; only then was the track hastily replaced with cinders.

There was no athletes’ village — in contrast to the lavish accommodation in Berlin in 1936. Instead, participants were crammed into a scattered assortment of barracks, hostels and schools. Rationing was still in force (although the daily allowance for athletes was higher); the gold medals were made of oxidised silver; the total budget for the Games was £730,000.

Yet the make-do-and-mend approach somehow emphasised what really mattered about the Games. “It was a liberation of the spirit to be there in London,” said Emil Zátopek, the Czechoslovak army officer whose dramatic exploits in the 10,000m and 5,000m made him a household name among British sports fans. “After those dark days of the war, the bombing, the killing and the starvation, the revival of the Olympics was as if the sun had come out. Suddenly, there were no frontiers, no more barriers, just people meeting together.”

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Like many middle-aged running enthusiasts, I think of Zátopek as a kind of patron saint of our sport: a man who embodied all the virtues of the long-distance runner, from demented dedication to grace in victory and defeat. I first heard his voice more than 30 years ago, in a documentary about the 1948 Games in which he spoke of his joy at being part of that Olympic rebirth in London.

He reminisced amusingly about his dawn journey, by public transport and on foot, from a barracks in Uxbridge to the school in Northwood where his future wife, the javelin-thrower Dana Ingrová, was staying. The anecdote culminated with one of his medals being dropped in a swimming-pool, and a semi-naked Zátopek being chased away by an enraged headmistress. Nothing was said about medals or times: the memories he cherished were to do with romance and adventure.

Later, I learnt more about this remarkable man: his mind-boggling training routines; his humour and kindness; his courage when the Prague Spring was crushed. Later still, writing his biography, I came across such additional details as the fact that, in 1948, his Communist minders barred him from attending the Olympic opening ceremony. It was a scorching hot day and he had a big race the next day: why jeopardise his chances by parading in the sun?

Zátopek protested: “People at home will ask me what the Olympics were like, and I will have to tell them that I don’t know, because I was sitting in the shade.” The minders insisted. So Zátopek, a self-taught polyglot, persuaded the Danish team to let him enter the stadium with them, before shuffling forward (since the nations were ordered alphabetically) to join his fellow Czechoslovaks. Some athletes wept as they marched around the track, overwhelmed by this final proof that the six-year nightmare of war was over. Had Zátopek’s priorities been more ruthlessly focused (in the modern way) on competitive advantage, he would never have shared that experience.

Four years later, Helsinki hosted the Games. Finland had recovered well, but the world’s wounds had festered. The Soviet Union insisted on a separate athletes’ village for the nations of the Communist bloc. Barbed wire and armed guards defended the special compound at Otaniemi from Western intrusion. Fraternisation was strictly forbidden.

Luckily for humanity, some athletes had better ideas – as young people often do. Soviet and US shot-putters were soon striking up cheerful friendships. So were the distance-runners of many nations. Australia’s Les Perry dodged his way into Otaniemi and sought out Zátopek, who invited him to train with him and insisted that he stay to dinner. Other Westerners followed, including the Australian trainer Percy Cerutty, who spent so long quizzing Zátopek about his training methods that the gates were locked for the night before he could leave. Zátopek gave him his bed and spent the night on a friend’s floor. Distance-running’s “class of ’52” (Perry, Zátopek, Mimoun, Reiff, Schade, Pirie, Chataway) remained in friendly contact for decades afterwards.

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Does any of this have anything to do with sport? Perhaps not much. Yet it matters.

In sporting terms, the 1952 Olympics are remembered primarily for Zátopek’s unique distance-running treble: 5,000m, 10,000m and marathon. But their most important gift to the world was the renewed sense they engendered of a worldwide Olympic “family”. By the time Zátopek claimed his place in history by winning the marathon (his third gold, and his first attempt at the distance), his charm and friendliness had already won him the hearts of most people watching.

Rivals from his previous two events – French, Belgian, English – cheered him from the roadside as he approached the stadium. When he entered it and ran his final lap of the last event of the Games, the crowd chanted his name in deafening unison. “At that moment,” said future International Olympic Committee chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was among the spectators, “I understood what the Olympic spirit means.”

Perhaps such pieties seem quaint. By the time Covid-19 has finished with us, their value may be more obvious.

That age of relative Olympic innocence was short-lived. In 1956, in Melbourne, the German businessman Horst Dassler spent the Games quietly handing out Adidas footwear to favoured athletes. In the decades that followed, the virus of money spread. So, slowly, did the virus of unequal kit.

Today we take all that for granted. You cannot expect to be an Olympic champion without marginal advantages: better shoes, better equipment, better nutrition, better scientific and medical back-up, better management, better sponsors and funding. Everyone knows that. What we easily forget is that, when our grandparents were sports fans, most Olympic events were largely a simple contest between human and human.

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I love the Olympics. I can retrieve my sporting memories from Games gone by as effortlessly as a poetry professor reaches for quotations. 1968? Bob Beamon, David Hemery, Kip Keino. 1972? Jim Ryun falling and losing, Lasse Virén falling and winning. 1976? Virén’s second distance-running double; disappointment for Brendan Foster and David Bedford; Comăneci, Juantorena. 1980? Coe, Ovett, Yifter, Thompson, Wells. 1984? Coe, Thompson, Sanderson, Whitbread, Moses, Decker-and-Budd. The list goes on. I watched them all, if necessary in the middle of the night.

I was also aware, even in my youth, of a darker chronology: the massacre of Israeli athletes in 1972; the grotesque injustices that provoked and succeeded the podium protests of Smith, Carlos, Norman and Čáslavská in 1968; the political boycotts (and their causes) in 1976, 1980 and 1984.

But I barely noticed another, insidious narrative. In 1968, anabolic steroids were banned. The still-unfinished war between those wishing to gain from performance-enhancing drugs and those wishing to prohibit them had begun. By 1988 (Ben Johnson), chemical assistance was endemic. There’s been a crackdown since, yet some say that 1988’s men’s 100m final in Seoul (in which only one of the first five finishers never tested positive for drugs) has been eclipsed by the women’s 1,500m final at London 2012 as the “dirtiest race in history”.

Meanwhile, money from television and sponsors has swollen the Olympic movement into a grotesquely wealthy, frequently corrupt sector of the entertainment industry, whose priorities could hardly be clearer: to the winner, oodles of glory and cash; to the also-rans, a lifetime of regret.

And today? Artificial assistance continues, but it’s mostly within the rules. That’s why, except when the Games are actually taking place, it’s hard to make sense of Olympic sport’s daily dramas without a decent grasp of such technicalities as ADRVs, TUEs and ABPs (Anti-Doping Rule Violations, Therapeutic Use Exemptions, and Athlete Biological Passports); and wash-out periods and “whereabouts” testing rules; or, beyond the laboratory: Athlete Performance Awards, sponsor hierarchies, IOC bidding processes, lottery funding, UK Athletics’ World Class Programme, Nike’s Oregon Project, World Athletics’ technical rules on carbon-fibre plates in shoes; and much, much more.

None of this would mean anything without individual human beings willing to devote years of their lives to heroic striving. But it’s easy to lose sight of them.

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As a sport-lover, I ought to be glad to see so much money, science and expertise flowing into the Olympics. Instead, I find it harder than before to love the Olympics. London 2012 was beautiful for Britain, obviously; and I’m delighted to hear that the BBC is planning to re-broadcast some of the highlights this summer. Otherwise, however (and I can’t believe I’m alone in this) I’ve increasingly found myself impressed rather than enthralled by these quadrennial spectaculars. Yes, competitors are faster, higher, stronger, and more skilled, than ever before. But what about the sense of the Games as a gathering of the human family?

In the UK, day-by-day media coverage of recent Olympic Games has focused relentlessly on the medals table. To ask what that has to do with the Olympic spirit is to risk being called an unpatriotic killjoy — or worse. Yet perhaps, now, things will change.

If Games of the XXXII Olympiad are indeed held in Tokyo next summer, I imagine that Team GB will struggle to hoover up medals with its usual industrial efficiency. The disruption to athletes’ preparations will have been too huge. Yet imagine how we’ll feel about the fact that the Games are taking place at all. It’s a prospect that feels almost too poignant to contemplate right now, as the wilderness of broken lives around us grows vaster and more terrible. Yet one day this, too, shall pass; and, when it does, sport will have a vital role to play in helping the world to heal itself.

In his speech at the 1948 opening ceremony, the head of the London organising committee, Lord Burleigh, told athletes that they were “kindling a torch, the light from which will travel to the uttermost ends of the earth, a torch of that ageless and heartfelt prayer of mankind throughout the world, for peace and goodwill to all men”

It was all guff, of course. It still is, just as Zátopek’s much-quoted “Great is the victory but greater still is the friendship” was guff and Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s “The important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part” was guff. But sometimes, in life’s darkest chapters, guff is all you’ve got.

Look at it this way: if Covid-19 hadn’t turned the world upside down and Tokyo 2020 had started in July as planned, which kind of Olympics do you think it would have been? A not-winning-but-taking-part Olympics? Or a win-at-all-costs Olympics? And which kind of Olympics would you expect it to be in 2021?

Perhaps I’m being naïve, but I can’t help suspecting that, next summer, the Olympic movement may find itself remembering something of its true spirit. There will be fewer record-breaking performances, but there will be more gratitude, more joy, more friendship; more sense that, after a long darkness, the sun has come out.

That will be small recompense for the tragedy of Covid-19. Yet it will, even so, be something to be grateful for.

Richard’s biography of Emil Zátopek, Today We Die A Little, was published in 2016 by Yellow Jersey.