As we reach the end of 2016, it is only right for all of us to look back at our sport’s amazing achievements. 

Contrition and acceptance are in short supply in the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin at this usually high-spirited time of year.

As I reflect on 2016, what strikes and saddens me when looking back on the headlines is that it has been yet another disastrous year for the governance and integrity of sport.  

My colleague David Owen wrote this week, at the end of this dark year, of the "redemptive power" of sport.

I shall miss these winter mornings waking up to the India versus England Test match cricket series.

What is it with those dopey Russians? Vilified for an alleged cynical and systematic programme of mass cheating by drug use on an unprecedented scale, you would think they might have got the message that they have become the pariahs in a world of sport which they may have tainted forever.

I found myself guilty of hypocrisy in my reactions to two different sporting issues last week.

If ever you doubted that Michael Phelps is the Greatest Of All Time (the GOAT), then Rio 2016 would have put paid to that.

As the old British saying goes, you wait ages for a London bus and then two come along at once.

Last Friday (December 9), we at UK Sport announced our investment decisions for Tokyo 2020 alongside our challenging ambition to deliver more medals and medallists in Japan.

Barring a massive computer cock-up or a questionable slice of rank injustice, Andy Murray will be crowned the BBC Sports Personality of the Year on Sunday (December 18) for the third time, and rightly so. It is a no-brainer after the fabulous year he has had.

The two-hour barrier for the marathon race has the same kind of mystique about it as did the four-minute mile before Roger Bannister became the first man to beat the latter landmark on a damp and inauspicious day in Oxford 62 years ago.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach's 121-word reaction to part two of the McLaren report contained some tough talk.

Richard McLaren’s 144-page report on Russian doping published last week was exactly what some sporting bodies have spent the past five months publicly calling for but privately hoping would never emerge: a smorgasbord of evidence implicating thousands of athletes which was damning yet also meticulous. In short, irrefutable proof that the world’s largest country was cheating not only to the level alleged, but to an even greater extent.