Last Sunday in the UK, one could settle down to watch an early morning Test match from India, Six Nations rugby union, Premier League football matches, including a showdown between Liverpool and Manchester City, and, last but not least, the Super Bowl from Florida.

Heck, if I have understood my social media posts correctly, golf fans could even have filled in any down-time by checking in on something rejoicing in the title of the Waste Management Phoenix Open.

And by the time that little lot was over, well, I would think the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne must have been just about getting under way.

Outside my window, however, the football goals in the recreation ground remain forlornly stashed away in the furthest corner.

While the swish new skateboarding facility is seeing good use, recreational sport in my neck of the woods remains, for now, a largely solitary undertaking.

What do all those marquee events have that our local Magpies soccer teams don’t?

In most if not all cases, hugely valuable media rights deals which make it worth investing time and money in attempting to virus-proof them.

The TV rights money associated with the Olympic Games is similarly substantial enough to warrant the monumental efforts being made at the moment to enable them to take place.

All the more so since the proceeds, should they materialise, will not disappear into the pockets of hugely well-rewarded professional athletes, but will be channelled into the profusion of bodies that organise international sport.

The Tokyo Olympics though are a special case for two further reasons.

First, logistically, they are WAY more complicated.

Make the comparison, for example, with the India versus England cricket Test series.

That will involve maybe 35 athletes and their respective entourages from two countries, one of them the host, performing in two venues.

The Test series will involve up to 130 hours of play, ie television, and some of the players whom the sport is investing heavily to protect and isolate can be expected to be in action for around 80 of those hours; perhaps even longer.

The Olympics is more akin to assembling a small city in some random place, that will already be densely populated, with "citizens" bussed in from literally every country on earth.

Ideally, an intricate web of business and diplomatic interests and those pursuing them will be overlaid on the sport.

And while the likes of Joe Root and Virat Kohli might have a direct hand in upwards of 80 hours of entertainment, some of those athletes ferried to Tokyo from far distant locations only to be eliminated in round one of the 100 metres can expect to be actually in action for less than 12 seconds.

Secondly, unlike I think any of these other events, the Tokyo Olympics faces a political conundrum.

A general election is scheduled for this year.

As seemingly confirmed by another opinion poll at the weekend, opposition to the Games going ahead as rescheduled remains strong in Japan, with fewer than 15 per cent of those questioned indicating that they thought the event should open as planned on July 23.

In democracies that I am familiar with, you would not expect a governing party facing the imminent prospect of a national plebiscite to stay wedded to a policy commanding that level of opposition.

Contractual commitments or matters of national honour might prove me wrong, but if these opinion poll numbers do not start to improve markedly – and soon – I would be surprised if support within the Liberal Democratic Party for the notion of pressing ahead with the Games in July and August does not start to waver.

In one way, I am lost in admiration for those trying to ensure that the Games can go ahead as rescheduled; it appears so complex and arduous a task, and the critics may not be kind if something goes wrong.

Even if they get every call right, organisers appear to accept that perfect security may not be attainable: the new press “playbook” spells out - twice - that “despite all care taken, we draw to your attention that risks and impacts may not be fully eliminated and that you agree to attend the Olympic and Paralympic Games at your own risk”.

Even if the Games duly happen and everyone comes and goes without incident, it is clear that a July/August Games would feel nothing like a normal Olympics – except perhaps to the millions watching on TV, which I guess is the point.

Clearly this ship has sailed, but the gargantuan efforts involved in giving the Games a sporting chance of getting under way on July 23 make me wonder whether my insidethegames colleague Michael Pavitt might not have been on to something recently when he raised the question of whether exporting Tokyo 2020 events might be considered.

An awful lot of Olympic sports will be hoping to have events of their own within a few weeks of the projected Tokyo start-date, at which the world’s best will be gathered, one way or another.

Wimbledon, scheduled to wrap up on July 11, is just one example.

Maybe it would have made sense to keep whatever protocols end up having to be implemented for such events in place for an extra week, enabling them to stage the various Olympic and Paralympic competitions as a follow-up to the pre-planned championships.

A much more manageable number of eight-to-10 sports - including those with most appeal to a Japanese audience - could then have been singled out for retention by Tokyo, along with the pageantry of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies.

As I say, this ship has sailed: no such plan is going to be implemented.

But even with our expanding arsenal of vaccines and other "tools" I cannot help but wonder if this attempt to go for broke and deliver as much as possible of what would have been Tokyo 2020 in normal times might not yet end in tears of frustration.

How devastating that would be for those who have devoted a decade of their lives to bringing the Japanese capital’s latest Olympic dream to fruition.