Before the International Swimming Federation (FINA) Short Course World Swimming Championships get underway in Hangzhou in China on Tuesday (December 11), the InterContinental Hangzhou hotel is hosting the fifth edition of the World Aquatics Convention.
Jump, or if you prefer, vault back just over two years ago to the point where Bruno Grandi, the grand old man of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG), was about to give way as President to one of two men.
As far as England football followers are concerned, the number is one. One World Cup win, 1966. Nothing since. For followers of India's men's hockey team the figures are more complex, but the overall story is the same.
Often when I meet those who have scrambled to the top of international sport's greasy pole, I conclude that they are politicians first and administrators second.
Today marks 100 years since "the war to end all wars" came to an end. The guns fell silent at the 11th hour of the 11th day in the 11th month in 1918.
Starting this Friday (November 9), Norway's 27-year-old chess player Magnus Carlsen, the world champion since 2013, will defend his title against Fabiano Caruana, who is a year his junior.
The decision to award Russia the 2020 European Weightlifting Championships on the same day its one-year suspension from the sport expired on October 17 was certainly a bold one.
La Liga President Javier Tebas certainly did not mince his words at last week's SPORTELMonaco convention, describing opposition to plans to play a match in the near future in the United States as "sporting puritanism".
For some - no, for many cities, the experience of having an Olympic bid aborted would deflate ambitions for major sporting expansion. Not so for Budapest, which today stages the official opening of the World Wrestling Championships, the latest in a dizzying succession of top international events taking place in the Hungarian capital.
Politics has been intermingled with sport in every one of the modern Olympics. That mixture was at its most violent and shocking at the 1972 Munich Games, when the Palestinian Black September group took 11 Israeli Olympic team members hostage, seeking a release of prisoners, and ended up killing them along with a West German police officer.
Thomas Bach has been forced to deal with several considerable challenges during his tenure as President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
The Olympic flame reaches a low point in its history today - but only in the literal sense.
It was 4.30am when the phone rang in my room at the media village in Seoul on September 27, 1988. "Get your backside down to the press centre, there’s a massive story breaking," urged my good friend John Goodbody, of The Times. "Ben Johnson’s been done for doping!”
On Friday (September 21), David Lappartient will have been International Cycling Union (UCI) President for a year, having succeeded Britain's Brian Cookson.
As the 48th World Rowing Championships get underway in Bulgaria today, one might imagine a small wreath bobbing about on the Plovdiv Rowing Venue course in memory of the late and lamented lightweight men's coxless four (LM4-) event that had its last outing at last year's World Championships at Sarasota-Bradenton in Florida.
At the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Iranian judoka Arash Miresmaeili was disqualified for weighing in at nearly four pounds above the limit for his weight class of his under-66 kilograms match against an Israeli opponent Ehud Vaks in the first round. It was claimed Miresmaeili had gone on an eating binge to protest the International Olympic Committee's recognition of the state of Israel. Iran does not recognise the state of Israel, and Miresmaeili's actions won praise from high-ranking Iranian officials. Mohammad Khatami, the country's President at the time, was quoted as saying Miresmaili's actions would be "recorded in the history of Iranian glories". He was later awarded $125,000 by the Government - the same amount given to Olympic gold medallists.
World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) - Deputy Director, Education - Montreal, Canada
Reporting to the Director of Education and Communications, the Deputy Director, Education will be responsible for leading the development and implementation of WADA’s strategic education priorities, programs and activities; including, managing WADA’s Social Science Research Grant Program and coordinating the activities of WADA’s Education Committee.
FINA is facing an unprecedented threat with the top swimmers taking legal action against them after they were barred from competing in the new International Swimming League. But FINA President Julio Maglione claims the new concept would represent a threat to the future well-being of the sport, as he tells Mike Rowbottom.
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