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President Putin has claimed that gay people will be welcome at the 2014 Winter Olympics but no one seems to have passed the message to the mayor of the host city Sochi, where the action begins a week on Friday. I have been in Sochi for a Panorama programme to be broadcast on Monday night, and Anatoly Pakhomov told us that there are no gay people in his town.

And despite Mr Putin’s guarantee to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that journalists would also be welcome in Sochi, soldiers from the FSB – the state security organisation, detained the Panorama team, including me, and took our passports.

Mr Pakhomov’s claim – an echo of the Radio Stars’ 1977 hit “No Russians in Russia” – is preposterously untrue to anyone who knows anything about the beach resort in Russia’s deep south. Boris Nemtsov, the opposition politician and unsuccessful candidate for the Sochi mayoralty, collapsed into giggles when I told him about the mayor’s statement, saying: “No gays in Sochi? Unbelievable, unbelievable.”

Drag queen Miss Zhu-Zha, a performer at the city’s best-known gay bar, said: “In some places there’s serious prejudice against gay people. In other places, it’s not so bad.” It’s a cautious comment, but none the less evidence of existence.

Our experience of detention at the hands of the FSB summed up Putin’s Games for me: the authorities pretending to be all smiley, but every now and then the guard drops, and you glimpse what feels like a police state.