At first sight, Ecclesiastes has a rather discouraging message for all those athletes who have spent the past four years honing their bodies and minds for the Olympics.

“The swift do not win the race,” Ecclesiastes says (ix, 11). Is God mocking the athlete’s hard work — surely such dedication should be rewarded not rebuffed? The answer comes in the next verse — “for time and chance govern all”.

It is a remarkable response. It offers encouragement to those who are not predicted to win: the toll that ‘time and chance’ can take on the apparent favourites means that the equally admirable efforts of others can lead to success. Far from suggesting that we drop out in dismay, Ecclesiastes urges us to opt in with hope because circumstances can work as much for us as against us, and the person who expects the unexpected is the one most likely to benefit from it.

The author of Ecclesiastes is much more interested in another endurance test — life itself — and concludes that “wisdom is better than strength”. He knows that the pounding of feet for a few glorious moments is no match for personal qualities that enhance a lifetime.

Jewish religious reservations were even more pronounced when the modern Olympics started. Rabbis discouraged participation because of the conflict between our tradition and what the Games then represented. While the former put the emphasis on values and co-operation, the latter focused on competition and winning; one exalted the development of the spirit, the other worshipped the prowess of the body. It was a clash between “the insistence on duty and the cult of beauty”, between the ethical demands of the one God and the capricious whims of the multiple Geek deities to whom the Games were originally dedicated.

There have also been practical religious problems when competing in the Games meant breaking the Sabbath. This deterred Orthodox Jews, just as it affected such devout Christians as Eric Liddell in 1924 and Jonathan Edwards more recently. If they raced, would that glorify the God they served or be a betrayal of their faith?

To many onlookers such agonising may be incomprehensible, but we all draw our red lines in different places, and it can be a lonely struggle when you are trying to reconcile conflicting loyalties within yourself.

There are other dilemmas over participation, as starkly exemplified by the Berlin Games in 1936 when the dark side of Nazi Germany was already apparent. Whatever the moral arguments, the reality is that nobody remembers who boycotted the event, but everyone recalls that the black athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals and forced Hitler to leave the stadium rather than shake his hand.

Owens’s victory did not stop the Second World War or prevent the Holocaust — or even dent Hitler’s belief in the superiority of Aryans — but, like the boycotts of the Moscow and Los Angeles Games, and the activities of those concerned with the fate of Tibet today, it raises the question of whether sports and politics be kept separate — or can the former exert an influence on the latter.

Do we shun an unacceptable ideology or do we to try to change it by engaging with it? The West isolated South Africa but it played ping-pong with China.

Perhaps Ecclesiastes is applicable here too. Time and chance are often the deciding factors, and the key is being able to respond as effectively as possible when those fickle forces coincide — be it in a 100 metres dash or during life’s continuing marathon.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain edited God, Doubt and Dawkins: a Jewish Response