Diplomatic immunity from local prosecution was an idea that sprang directly from another incident, almost a century earlier, involving the arrest of a Russian aristocrat, Andrey Matveyev, who represented Peter the Great in London. Matveyev was detained and roughed up by bailiffs who demanded money from him.

Unlike football, the Olympics were always closely associated with elites amateur athletes recruited from universities, and so on. The father of the modern Olympic Games, Baron de Courbertin, was a French aristocrat who promoted sports to reinvigorate the men of France after their defeat in the Franco Prussian War of 1871.