Just a bit of background here if you have recently been travelling yourself from the Alpha Centauri galaxy - Djokovic, unvaccinated but invited to defend his Australian Open title after obtaining a medical exemption from the host state and Tennis Australia - has been obliged to leave the country after an 11-day legal wrangle.

After successfully appealing against his visa cancellation, the 34-year-old Serbian, who had arrived seeking a record-breaking 21st men's singles Grand Slam title, was re-banned by Australia's Immigration Minister Alex Hawke "on health and good order grounds" - a ruling that was upheld by a Federal court.

Anyway. Those complications and their ramifications set aside for the moment, this has become one of the classic airport news stories, wherein the most mundane footage assumes centre screen.

Before the sensational pictures of a man sitting in a seat on an airplane, wearing a mask and appearing to be staring directly forwards we were treated, repeatedly, to footage of this same tall, athletic man arriving at an airport check-in point shouldering a couple of sheathed rackets and accompanied by three companions.

At this point, comically, he was asked to lower his mask as an official sought corroboration with his passport photograph. You might have thought his fame, and the current news angle, and the accompanying TV cameras, and the…anyway, that’s what Djokovic was made to do, and he complied quite willingly.

Soon we were on to pictures from Belgrade's Nikola Tesla Airport, where some home tennis fans had gathered in welcome, bearing national flags.

There were some earnest interviews with reporters standing by, involving much nodding in confirmation of things already known, and things surmised, before familiar images swam back onto the screen - images of Djokovic stopping at a passport point, and sitting in a seat on a plane…

After so many days when the man at the centre of this story has been absent from public gaze, for the most part resident in an immigration detention hotel, cameras official and unofficial have been free to feast on images of the utmost banality.

This is a classic example of a very well-established genre of sporting reportage.

Last year there was a short, frenzied period of TV pictures showing athletes pushing trolleys full of luggage up ramps at Tokyo’s Narita and Haneda airports as they arrived to train before the on/off/postponed/on Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

It was where the story was at. It provided moving images to tell the story, no matter that the images were dull and mundane and repeated ad nauseam.

Another classic airport/sports story format is the Returning in Glory theme. In 2003, in company with numerous other reporters, I arrived shortly after 4am at Heathrow’s Terminal 4 to witness the return of England’s Rugby World Cup winners from Australia aboard a BA16 flight temporarily named "Sweet Chariot".

Clive Woodward was first to emerge from the plane, followed by captain Martin Johnson, whose huge mitts made the Webb Ellis Trophy look rather like a children’s trophy.

The team were greeted in the arrivals hall by exuberant, chanting crowds, and as they prepared to board their coach a singer with a microphone piped up with a rendition of Jerusalem.

They looked dazed; they looked fazed. You could see a new reality settling upon them.

Such airport encounters are interesting. Others can be instructive.

Before the 1990 Commonwealth Games got underway in Auckland there was much speculation that the event might be grievously affected by an African boycott.

Four years earlier the 13th Commonwealth Games, held in Edinburgh, had been severely disrupted by a boycott involving African, Caribbean and many Asian countries, including India, over the issue of economic sanctions against South Africa.

The Games turned out to be a financial disaster, despite the apparent support of the then Mirror newspaper group owner Robert Maxwell, and many believed the event would founder if there were to be a repeat in Auckland.

In those uneasy days before competition began I recall one of my compadres, an excellent journalist, confidently predicting that a boycott was on once again.

Word emerged that the famed anti-apartheid campaigner Desmond Tutu, then Archbishop of Cape Town, would be arriving in the early hours at Auckland airport.

Only a few reporters, and a TV crew, were waiting for him. He was exceedingly polite and helpful. And he gave us to understand that there would not be a mass political boycott of the Auckland Games such as the one that had afflicted Edinburgh. And there wasn't.

"A boycott here in Auckland once again would almost certainly have spelt doom for the Games,” said Peter Heatly, chairman of the Commonwealth Games Federation, soon after the event had concluded.

“No one would have wanted to host the Games ever again."

Auckland was described by one official as the "rebirth of the Commonwealth Games".

An airport sports story without images, but relevant nevertheless.