I first spotted a job advert for a junior reporter position here when still at university and it immediately leaped out. Not only did it combine my love of the Olympic Games with skills gleaned during the international relations masters I was just finishing, but, unlike most other things I was ruled out of applying for, they didn’t require journalistic qualifications and were prepared to take a punt on raw talent.

Very raw, in my case.

After receiving my first green and pink tie in a ceremony which felt rather like a cricketer being handed a debut Test cap, my first trip was with my editor Duncan Mackay to a press conference in London. I was awestruck when we bumped into Sebastian Coe on the way to the Olympic Stadium and, as we chatted about the previous night’s Diamond League, we kept being interrupted by people congratulating him on the success of London 2012. My aura was shattered somewhat when we had to perform a sudden U-turn as his assistant had led us to a dead end in an underground car park.

A couple of weeks later and I was on the rarely trodden path from Guangzhou to Nanjing in China for my first overseas venture at the Asian Youth Games. Three days after returning, I was off to Buenos Aires to cover the crucial International Olympic Committee (IOC) Session at which Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics and Thomas Bach was elected President.

After failing to ask a question at an Istanbul 2020 press conference, I was ordered to sit on the front row and stick my hand up immediately at the following Tokyo one. I was duly picked straight away and my first ever question was nervously addressed to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe.

Gentle introductions were clearly not the insidethegames way. 

In China, it had been suggested that I pop along to the Nanking Massacre memorial and do a column about how Japan's Olympic prospects could be harmed by memories of World War Two. I naively did so without realising what a political minefield I had been thrown into and, when I arrived in Argentina, I soon overheard a Tokyo consultant muttering to a colleague: "Is this that new bastard, Nick Butler?" before confronting me about the article.

And so began an amazing five years of globetrotting and navigating the weird and frequently wonderful world of international sports politics.

Highlights, without wishing to appear too self-indulgent, have included being held in an "interrogation room" in Ashgabat airport after my Turkmenistan visa application was rejected, working in a Washington D.C. hotel bar which suddenly started hosting the city's largest annual drag queen pageant, being persuaded to try the local delicacy of fermented horse milk in Kazakhstan - unequivocally the most disgusting thing I have ever tasted - and hitching a lift in a Presidential car benefiting from an escort by two aggressive police outriders armed with batons and horns in the Mexico City rush hour. I could go on.

On these trips I frequently got into difficulties. I arrived in both Manila and Rio de Janeiro in early 2014 to discover my laptop would not turn on and was completely unusable. A few months later I completed an undesirable hat-trick when spilling coffee all over my new computer midway through an Alistair and Jonathan Brownlee press conference at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

My eyes locked with the triathlon brothers as I ran out of the room, laptop dripping beneath me, and I detected a faint look of amusement which was understandably not replicated by insidethegames management when I owned up to having broken yet another one.

I was also learning a huge amount from my colleagues and recall feeling very inadequate during working breakfasts in Buenos Aires at which Duncan and our chief columnist David Owen would go through all the numerous stories they had managed to find out about over the previous 24 hours.

David then effortlessly compiled a list of which way he thought all 100 IOC members would vote in the 2020 Olympic contest and, in something that still amazes me today, got his final vote breakdown pretty much bang on.

I slowly began to understand better the world of Olympic politics and realised that, once you looked beyond the good words and triumphant press releases, this could also be a somewhat murky world of backroom deals and skulduggery. The IOC were still on a post-London 2012 high when I started but would soon be facing a flood of European withdrawals in the 2022 Olympic race which they are still to fully confront.

Bach, who had seemed rather jolly and jovial on first impression, showed his ruthless side by rapidly outmaneuvering ex-SportAccord President Marius Vizer after he dared to criticise him early in 2015. 

My personal relationship with Bach, if any, disappeared the following year when I confronted him during the Youth Olympics in Lillehammer about rumours of Russian doping problems at Sochi 2014. "I don’t know what you want to create here," he said.

A few months later, though, Grigory Rodchenkov came clean about what he had really been up to at the Moscow Laboratory and a Russian doping scandal which has been by far the biggest and longest-running story I have covered began.

This has spanned two more Olympics in Rio and Pyeongchang, both of which were thoroughly enjoyable, and I gradually realised that I almost preferred covering the politics behind the scenes to the actual sport itself.

Working at insidethegames has inevitably made me sceptical about some achievements you see in sport, but, unlike some others, I haven't yet lost my love for the Olympics and still believe that, despite all its challenges, it is one of best and most unifying events in the world. 

Sporting highlights I have witnessed included virtually every night of swimming at Rio 2016 as well as an exhausting tennis final there won by Andy Murray over Juan Martín del Potro.

There are also many brilliant characters involved in sport who I will hugely miss working with so closely.

I won’t be too far away, though, and will be moving to Berlin next month to join the ARD anti-doping editorial team led by Hajo Seppelt, so will still be covering the sports world.

In the meantime, I am sure my old colleagues at insidethegames will go from strength to strength and continue to play a key role in holding those who run sport to account in a way that they, as virtually the only organisation that travels and covers the Olympic Movement on a full-time basis, do better than most.

I'm not quite sure yet how I feel about the prospect of not being able to wear the insidethegames green and pink tie again but will miss so many things about a job that has invariably felt much more like a hobby.

I would like to particularly thank Duncan, our managing director Sarah Bowron and desk editor Dan Palmer for all the guidance, opportunities and “constructive criticism” I have received over the years.

And I look forward to seeing them all in some far-flung media room in the future...or even at another makeshift one during a drag pageant.

If you want to keep in touch, you can find me on Twitter here.