Re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gretchen’s Forty Winks this week, I was reminded of how he would write short stories in an "authentic" manner before adding the "twists that made them into saleable magazine stories".

When the Tour de France rolled out of Nice last month the smart money was on coronavirus providing a dramatic ending to the race, rather than the riders.

Of the 150 or so boxers who have taken part in the principal pandemic punch-ups conducted behind closed doors over the last couple of months I have noticed only one, 25-year-old middleweight Denzel Bentley from Battersea in south London, has taken the knee as a symbolic gesture towards the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet there has been no Lewis Hamilton-like complaints from him just because nobody followed suit.

Sixty years ago this week, they lined the streets of Athens to welcome home the only Greek Olympic champion at the Rome Olympics as he rode through the city in an open-top Rolls Royce.

Let me start by adding to the condemnation of Iran’s execution of wrestler Navid Afkari last week.

How the Olympic Movement needs its regular fix of sport.

This year we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games. For our country and a whole generation, that had been a major sports event.

World record performances on the track, in my experience, have involved jubilant figures crossing a line, frozen digital figures on the infield clock and a swift confluence of those bearing flowers, cameras and microphones.

Naomi Osaka earned her second US Open title last night, withstanding a scintillating opening set from opponent Victória Azárenka to triumph 1-6, 6-3, 6-3.

As I’m sure is the case for all sports federations, 2020 has not evolved quite as the International Federation of Teqball (FITEQ) was expecting back in January.

The launch of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic symbol last week means that there are now four different emblems for future Olympic Games in "circulation" at the same time.

It seems a lifetime ago that a four-year package of sanctions was imposed on Russia by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) as punishment for the manipulation of the Moscow Laboratory data.

The whys and wherefores of Olympic bidding are far from the top of the sports news agenda at present: just staging the events that have already been allocated is a big enough challenge until COVID-19 has been tamed.

It’s just not cricket… No, it certainly is not. It is most other sports too, where allegations of racism, bullying, sexism, corruption, misconduct and maladministration are hitting the headlines in the United Kingdom. What a mess!