Olympic retro?

I enjoyed this when I read it in The Week today.  It's a letter to The Guardian having a little reminisce about the old days of the USSR at the Olympics:

Every four years the former soi-disant Stalinist teacher of Soviet politics in me rises to the surface and I tot up how the old Soviet Union would have done in the Olympic medals table (Report, 13 August). This year I made it 47 golds won by the Russian Federation and the former Soviet republics, putting them at the top of the table, one ahead of the capitalist-imperialist United States (with its Nato lackeys far behind), and a massive nine ahead of deviationist China.
Robert O'Farrell
Shepton Mallet, Somerset

I guessed it wasn't from Andy Newman of Socialist Unity.