Lateral thinker Edward De Bono believes he is responsible for the fact that the Olympic Games survived beyond the 1980s.

In a letter sent to The Times being published today, Mr De Bono claims he inspired a way to preserve the longevity of the games.

"The 1976 Games in Montreal were a financial disaster and lost over one billion dollars. The 1980 Games were similarly loss-making. Had the same thing happened to the1984 Games in Los Angeles, the Olympics would have come to an end because no city in the world would have wanted to host them."

But in 1984, the Games were a huge success, and organiser Peter Ueberroth, who made Time magazine's Man of the Year helped the Games make a profit of $250 million.

The ideas used in those Games turned them from a disaster that no city wanted to something which cities competed to get (even, allegedly, resorting to bribery to do so).

"In an interview, Mr Ueberroth had recounted how he had used this "special thinking" called lateral thinking. He had learned this from me at a short talk I had given to the Young Presidents Organisation in Boca Raton, Florida, in 1975."

"So it was a thinker from Malta who was responsible for the very continuation of the Games," he concludes.