US Edition THIS week, the Principality of Monaco has been more than usually crowded with sporting celebrities, having a more than usually good time. They have played golf, sailed on the harbour and partied in the grandest style. This morning, several stars woke to the added pleasure of a trophy on the bedside table, as winners of the 2001 Laureus World Sports Awards.
The awards - the soi-disant Oscars of the sporting world - have attracted no small amount of derision, and it is easy to see why. The organisers are, by definition, awarding a further prize to people who have already won plenty. They are heaping luxury on those who are already used to it. And they are doing so in Monte Carlo, surely the global capital of bad taste.
It is easy to satirise the gala awards ceremony, with its cheerleaders, its ice-dance routine, its specially-composed Laureus anthem; easy to knock the frequent name-checks for the sponsors, Cartier and Daimler-Chrysler; easy to prick the pomposity of the whole affair.
But it would be a mistake to go on from that to the assumption that the Laureus Awards are a bad thing. They are not. They are a good thing, for two reasons.
Firstly, they are an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of two categories of sport that are often overlooked: sport for the disabled and "alternative" or minority interest sports. Sharing the platform and the plaudits in the Grimaldi Forum with the likes of Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher and Cathy Freeman were some less well-known figures.
People such as Lee Pearson, the British rider who won gold medals in the three events he entered at the 2000 Paralympics. Like Vinny Lauwers, the Australian who last year became the first paraplegic to sail around the world. Like Davo Karnicar, who skied down Everest, or Mike Horn, who circumnavigated the world around the equator.
This was a chance for these extraordinary people - and a handful more alike in courage and determination - to meet their better-known and better-paid fellow sportsmen and sportswomen from the mainstream disciplines. And to gain some of the precious oxygen of publicity that may make funding their future efforts a little easier.
Secondly, the awards are the sponsors' rewards for the good works they have funded over the year. Here, too, there has been criticism. Laureus put $1 million a year into the Sport for Good Foundation, who in turn fund sport-related social projects around the world. It has been suggested that the amount is paltry, particularly in comparison to what has been spent in Monaco over the last few days.
But is it fair, or sensible, to criticise people who give a million dollars to good causes, simply on the basis that they should give more, or that they spend some more of their money in a rather conspicuous manner?
I have seen the work that the Sport for Good Foundation support with the Midnight Basketball League in Richmond, Virginia, and with the Kick project in east Berlin. The money goes a long way in these places and, what is more, the presence of the sports stars who visit through Laureus generates tremendous enthusiasm among the young people involved, and helps to attract greater local support and interest.
Publicity at that local level and on the global scale of the awards ceremony is the wellspring of the Laureus Awards. It is, in many ways, the ultimate public relations exercise, in which the wealthy patrons get to mingle with the stars of sport without having to go through the tedious business of watching a sporting event. It is tremendously easy - almost instinctive, in fact - for a sports writer to be cynical about this. But cynicism never changed a life.