The last of five Saturdays of competition showcased a new team format which the governing body hope will be added to the programme at Paris 2024. It is fair to say that taekwondo have been a little late to the party when it comes to mixed team competition. A proposal last year to add a new and, at that point, rarely showcased medal event at Tokyo 2020 was justly overlooked by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in favour of more advanced formats in other sports, such as judo and triathlon.

They are now making up for lost time, however, and excitement was added in Wuxi by a "tag-team" format in the final round, where a coach could switch which of his four players were on the mat at any time. It was a work in progress. Many of the top countries are still yet to compete, or enter their leading athletes, in the team event and I felt that ways could be found to make the format slightly more comprehensible to the average punter.

But there is plenty of time for it to grow and it was also a more explosive, quick-fire version in which the stodgier, lower-scoring tactics common in individual taekwondo were sacrificed in favour of all-out attack.

Taekwondo is a sport which has made huge leaps since the scandal-dominated Games of Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008 nearly saw it dumped from the Olympic programme. They are set to benefit from some good public relations next month when a joint-demonstration team from North and South Korea features at Pyeongchang 2018, but changes to the sporting product itself have been far more significant. 

A new electronic and scoring innovation system has been introduced virtually every year in a bid to improve the judging and new 4D camera technology was on show in Wuxi to provide different angles from which to analyse a bout.

I was also impressed to find, when invited to a post-competition "banquet" in Wuxi, how athletes were close to being at the centre of the event. The winners of the four previous weeks of competition had pride of place on the main table and it was they, rather than administrators, who appeared the most in demand "stars" present.

This sounds obvious but, in my experience of attending these sorts of events including in taekwondo before, it is actually fairly unusual. So often you attend a meeting of sporting administrators and you hear a perfunctory tribute to "athletes first" before the agenda is dominated by politics and business.

Olympic boxing has been far less successful than taekwondo in reforming its product over the last 10 years. It became bogged-down in an ill-fated attempt to embrace the professional ranks and this culminated in the overthrow last year of the International Boxing Association's (AIBA) former overlord, CK Wu.

Wu had certainly lost control, but Gafur Rakhimov, the Uzbek businessman with links to organised crime who is now at the interim helm, seems even worse. The IOC have already admitted they are "extremely worried" by the latest developments.

I am told by my colleague covering last weekend’s AIBA Extraordinary Congress in Dubai how there was only the briefest of mentions about the need to introduce video technology and an appeals system to eradicate the judging problems which ruined the Rio Olympic competition.

We never got to the bottom of what exactly happened there. Were the terrible decisions incurred against the likes of Irish boxer Michael Conlan due to bad judging or something more sinister? And, if the latter, who was behind it?

It is abundantly clear that if AIBA - aside from all its other financial and political problems - does not sort out concerns surrounding the field of play and judging, and do so quickly, then the sport must be removed from the Olympics by the IOC to avoid the Games becoming a laughing-stock. 

This would be very harsh on all the athletes who compete in the sport, but they have been let down time and time again by boxing's administrators and shady associates.

There are many other instances where athletes have been let-down by the powers-that-be.

Sports news coverage over the past week has been dominated by the sentencing of former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor Larry Nassar. He was eventually jailed for 40 to 175 years on seven counts of criminal sexual abuse under the guise of medical treatment against athletes including a host of Olympic champions and medallists. This was the tip of the iceberg, though, and a scarcely comprehensible 156 girls and women have testified to being abused by Nassar.

It is hard to understand how he was able to get away with this behaviour for so long and an "independent" investigation has been launched to find out exactly why. USA Gymnastics and other authorities seemingly prioritised the protection of themselves and the organisation over acting on the many complaints they received.

This cannot be allowed to happen again.

Virtually every country around the world seems to be facing other abuse and bullying accusations made by athletes against coaches and administrators. Elite sport is a hard and unforgiving place, and athletes will rarely make it to the top if they are molly-cuddled. But, at the same time, there must be a concerted attempt to stop this happening. 

Canadian IOC member Richard Pound has described the Nassar affair as United States' equivalent of the Russian doping scandal and you would hope that universal safeguards to protect athletes from sexual and physical abuse are discussed by bodies including the IOC.

Another increasingly difficult challenge across certain sports in the news over the last week has been the growing number of injuries suffered as athletes become bigger and more powerful and the calendar becomes ever-more cluttered.

All of the competing countries are ravaged by the injury-induced absence of leading stars before the Rugby Six Nations Championships due to start next week. An increasing number of top tennis players were also forced to cut their seasons short last year, or delay their start to this one, for similar reasons. Cricket, with its abundance of new Twenty20 franchises popping-up all over the world, faces similar problems.

Yes, more events mean more revenue, and athletes usually benefit from this as much as anyone. But a balance must be found between growing the sport and expecting too much from its most precious assets.

The IOC, as the self-styled supreme body responsible for the running of sport, have responsibility above and beyond the Olympic Games. They have certainly done more to assist athletes and the "field of play" than some, but more improvements are needed.

I wrote last week about unease surrounding the IOC decision to proritise "peace through sport" by encouraging a Pan Korean women's ice hockey team at Pyeongchang 2018 at the risk of derailing the preparations of the South Korean squad. Yes, this was maybe too good an opportunity to miss, but it should not be forgotten that their priority remains ensuring the best possible Olympic sporting competition.

The Russian doping scandal should have reinforced this message to the IOC. However difficult it has been to strike an appropriate compromise between punishing Russia and keeping the Olympics intact, it has simply not been good enough that we are entering the final week before the Opening Ceremony of a second successive Olympic Games with lingering uncertainty over Russian participation.

I think the IOC Athletes' Commission must do more. Too often under its current and soon-to-depart chair Angela Ruggiero, the panel has appeared nothing more than an echo-chamber for the IOC leadership and has been reluctant to take a public stand on issues that have deviated from IOC priorities.

There are many examples of sports, such as taekwondo, improving the way they treat athletes, but the case of Nassar and other scandals shows how a huge amount of progress is still required.

The IOC Session in Pyeongchang next week would be a good starting-point to move beyond the rhetoric and really tackle issues that matter to athletes in sport.