First: it is not just the Commonwealth Games.

The ninth Francophone Games finally took place in July and August in Kinshasa, six years after the eighth, after two postponements and in a different continent to that originally designated.

The Summer Youth Olympic Games have been pushed back by four years, leaving a yawning eight-year interval between the third edition, in 2018 in Buenos Aires, and the planned fourth in Senegal in 2026.

The Winter Olympics seems to find it harder and harder to unearth hosts.

The event now looks destined perhaps to rotate around a small number of winter sports centres that are already equipped with the necessary specialist sports infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the spectre of global warming hovers menacingly in the background.

The Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) was, for a time, a font of imaginative new multi-sports event ideas, to the evident displeasure of some.

Now, the entire organisation is defunct.

One relatively new multi-sports event has, admittedly, just drawn to a close, having featured more than 2,000 athletes.

But this was the second edition of the CIS Games in the Belarusian capital Minsk, an event which underlined, if nothing else, how international sport and politics will always be inextricably intertwined, at least for as long as the nation-state is their organisational template.

One might be drawn to conclude from this that the long-term future of the format may depend on the Big Daddy of multi-sports, the Summer Olympic Games - particularly as the significance of some other multi-sports events derives in part from the availability of Olympic qualifying places.

It would be fanciful or worse to suggest that the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s flagship event was failing, even if it is not in as good a place as 15 or 20 years ago.

But, after flawed editions in Rio and Tokyo, it badly needs next year’s event in the cradle of the modern Movement, Paris, to be memorable for all the right reasons.

Unfortunately, at the moment it is hard to imagine Paris 2024 not being overshadowed by Russia, especially if, as has been suggested, Vladmir Putin tries to drag out the Ukraine conflict until after the next United States Presidential election.

If that happens, then the onus to deliver a truly spectacular Games to bolster the Movement’s prospects would switch to Los Angeles which - reassuringly - has already pulled off this trick once, in 1984.

It would be misleading, though, to suggest that the IOC’s, and the Summer Games’s, current problems are exclusively down to unforeseeable, one-off, non-sports-related issues such as Ukraine or COVID.

The sports calendar is ever more crowded; football/soccer is more and more dominant in its capacity to command sports fans’ attention, week in, week out.

Even during the couple of months a year (at most) when the big names are not in action, the extravagant soap opera of the player transfer market ensures that football generates the lion’s share of mainstream sports media coverage.

What is more, the number of individual football properties of genuine global interest is proliferating, with Lionel Messi’s Major League Soccer and the Women’s World Cup among the latest to join the list.

Single-sport events are, moreover, for the most part much easier to stage.

Hosting fees comprise a significant proportion of revenues for some International Sports Federations (IFs), whereas the IOC makes big financial contributions to Olympic Games Organising Committees.

While it remains true that for two or three weeks every fourth year, the Olympic Games dominates the global sports conversation, that leaves 205 weeks when Olympic sport languishes well down the agenda, with the possible exception of another couple of weeks in 30 or 40 cold northern-hemisphere nations.

The IOC used to have a way of keeping Olympic affairs compellingly in the public eye, at least in a selection of relatively powerful and wealthy countries, during the long intervals between Games.

But then the selection process for choosing hosts was reformed.

The harsher economic climate that has dogged the West more or less unbroken since the financial crisis of 2007-2008 has also worked somewhat to the Summer Games’s disadvantage.

The complex city remoulding projects that only a Summer Olympics could inspire, and that at their best could enduringly improve the lives of many thousands, are far harder to sell to taxpayers in democratic systems when times are tough.

It was always fiendishly difficult to marry the short-term needs of the Games and the long-term interests of Host Cities; but with the focus on constraining costs and minimising new-build, this opportunity for a worthwhile legacy is diluted.

The necessity for Paris (preferably) and/or Los Angeles to deliver a truly stand-out event later this decade is underlined by a moment of truth which, if not yet imminent, is creeping closer day by day.

This is the moment when the IOC will need to go to market for the next broadcasting rights deal for the Games in the United States.

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of this future transaction.

The current deal, covering three Olympic cycles, is yielding $7.65 billion (£6 billion/€7 billion) - a substantial chunk of expected IOC revenues over the 12 years, an even more substantial chunk of expected cash receipts.

Though announced as long ago as 2014, this deal runs all the way through until 2032, so the IOC still, like Mick Jagger, has time on its side.

But the media business has been among the fastest-changing on earth in recent times.

There can be no guarantee that these rights will continue to increase in value, as they have since the dawn of the international television age.

If this growth falters, that will perhaps be the time for serious worries about the future of the multi-sports event model.