By Mike Rowbottom

Miller Elwin grew up on Mota Lava Island, one of the most northerly in the archipelago which forms the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. Her island had one truck and two telephones. When she was 17, Elwin, already an accomplished beach volleyball player, left her homeland for Vanuatu's capital of Port Vila in order to further her career.

It was the first stage of a journey which Elwin dearly hopes will conclude with an appearance at the Olympic Games - a journey which she is now making in partnership with Henriette Iatika, three years her senior, with whom she recently finished ninth in the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB) World Championship. That journey, however, will come to an abrupt end next year if no extra sponsorship can be found, the team's head coach, Lauren McLeod, has told insidethegames, and her concerns have been echoed by Debbie Masauvakalo, President of Vanuatu Beach Volleyball.

In 2008, a year after they had started playing together, Elwin and Iatika won a historic gold at the Oceania Championships, beating the defending champions, Tahiti, in three sets. The Oceania women's title had always been shared previously between Australia, New Zealand or Tahiti. It was also the first time that Vanuatu had won an Oceania title in any sport.

In the summer of 2010, as John Steele - named last month as chair of the English Institute of Sport (EIS) while retaining his role as chief executive of the Youth Sport Trust - prepared to leave UK Sport to take up his exciting new role as the Rugby Football Union's (RFU) chief executive, the message board for followers of Northampton, his old club, debated the merits of his appointment.

One particularly acid response suggested that it would be only a matter of time before Steele found himself a nice, comfortable berth on the gravy train among the other "blazers", adding defiantly that, if he wished to offer a different signal he should take an immediate 30 per cent pay cut.

The rejoinder from another Northampton follower was immediate, and courteous.

By David Owen

When Thomas Bach, the new International Olympic Committee (IOC) President, bumps into Sebastian Coe, he sometimes greets him jokingly as "Shakespeare". And when the British Olympic Association (BOA) chairman returns the greeting, he will often refer to his old friend as "the professor".

The derivation of the joke dates back more than three decades, to 1981 to be precise, when the two men were at the heart of what, in retrospect, can be described as a veritable Olympic revolution.

The unlikely setting for this event was the tranquil German town of Baden-Baden with, as one contemporary chronicler put it, "its spa waters and gentle parkland paths for the retired".

By Mike Rowbottom

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the British men's victory in the Seoul Olympic hockey tournament, and the players who achieved that historic result will gather again tonight at Midlands hotel to recall and reminisce. Among them will be David Faulkner, left back on that glorious day in Korea, now director of sport at Millfield School having stepped down from his role as performance director for hockey, a role he filled from 2005 until the end of the London 2012 Games, where Britain's men finished fourth and the women won bronze.

By the time he retired from playing, Faulkner, now 50, had won 225 caps for England and Great Britain. He is looking forward to his latest get-together with the Boys of 88.

By Mike Rowbottom

It tells you everything you need to know about Peter Elliott that the greatest disappointment of his sporting life was neither failing to earn selection for the 1984 Olympic 1500 metres despite having beaten eventual winner Seb Coe at the trials, nor missing out on gold at the Seoul Games four years later- and 25 years to the day on October 1 - behind Kenya's 21-year-old unknown Peter Rono, although that was a savage and enduring source of hurt.

No. The biggest disappointment for a man who hung up his spikes in possession of Olympic and world silver as well as Commonwealth gold and bronze came in 1990, when he was unfit to run a race on his local track in Rotherham.

By David Owen

The lithe physique and matinee-idol good looks are long gone. But those bright blue eyes still hold the attention. They soften around the edges as I coax the man who was once the greatest sprinter in the world on a spellbinding and frequently startling excursion down memory lane.

Today, Valeriy Borzov is a 63-year-old, navy blue-blazered member of the most powerful club in world sport: the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and a former Minister and politician in his native Ukraine.

Four decades ago, however, he was the most potent weapon in the extensive "soft power" armoury at the disposal of the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

By Mike Rowbottom

This week a former sprinter will step onto the track which helped propel him to the sporting height of becoming Olympic 100 metres champion - a position from which he fell, all the way down to earth, shortly afterwards. We are talking, naturally, of Ben Johnson, whose astonishing world record of 9.79sec at the 1988 Seoul Games - set in the Jamsil Olympic Stadium 25 years ago to the day on September 24 - was annulled in the wake of his positive drug test, and whose gold medal was revoked.

A quarter of a century on, an older and, it seems, wiser man will return to the scene of the electric activity which remains his ambivalent signature. For this 51-year-old product of Jamaica, and resident of Canada, the return to South Korea will mark the end of a form of pilgrimage which has already taken him to the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Japan, under the banner of a new anti-doping initiative.

By David Owen

After you. Oh no, after you.

It is a comedy routine as old as the hills, but it afflicts all of us every once in a while. And on Wednesday (September 11) evening, as they prepared to leave Buenos Aires, it afflicted the eighth and ninth Presidents of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

"You must go first, you are the current President," said Jacques Rogge, or words to that effect.

"Ah, but you have seniority," replied Thomas Bach.

By Mike Rowbottom

As Jacques Rogge steps away from the position as President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which he has held since 2001, there is a certain irony in the circumstances.

In 1894, two years before the first of the modern Olympics took place in Athens, the man credited with their instigation, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was still struggling to kindle public enthusiasm for the idea. He raised the topic once again at the Congress of the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques, at which the bulk of debate centred upon what constituted amateur sport, with one of the key topics being that of betting.

In March 2011 Rogge addressed the very same question, describing reports of illegal betting within sumo wrestling as "another frightening example", and adding: "There have been documented cases of cheating and match-fixing in sumo wrestling in Japan. There has been recently a very visible case in cricket. There is no safe haven in the world where nothing happens."

By David Owen

The three-cornered contest to get onto the sports programme for the 2020 Summer Games could be seen as both the most, and the least, predictable of next month's three big Olympic races.

Like me, few people I have discussed the September 8 vote with, and who have no links to any of the candidates, can quite bring themselves to believe that the Movement truly would jettison the historical Olympic sport of wrestling and consign it to possible oblivion, at least as a globalised activity outside the realm of showbiz.

To that extent, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board's surprise decision in February to drop wrestling from the list of core sports might be interpreted as hard cheese on its remaining rivals, baseball-softball and squash.

By Nick Butler in Nanjing

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."
Confucius (551-479 BC)

Such is the significance here of this ancient philosopher whose teachings have reverberated through the ages, it seems somewhat appropriate to start some reflections on Nanjing with a Confucian proverb.

His message about physical experience being the best form of learning is indeed as relevant today as ever before and bears dual relevance on this year's Asian Youth Games. This is due both to its purpose as a test event to "do" and "understand" ahead of next summer's Youth Olympic Games and through its role to provide "understanding" for a budding athlete in an ongoing journey of learning.

By Mike Rowbottom

It seemed odd to be holding an opening ceremony at the end of the first day of competition here at the 2013 World Championships – but perhaps President Vladimir Putin was busy earlier.

He certainly appeared to have things on his mind as he stood listening, with increasingly barely concealed impatience, to the very long speeches of the sporting dignitaries around him before the celebrations concluded with fireworks which burst and flared over the already sumptuously lit centre of Moscow.

For Russia, and Putin, these World Athletics Championships are one in a sequence of similarly annexed sporting gatherings including the 2018 FIFA World Cup, the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics and Formula One racing.

By David Owen

I am sitting in an Oxford hotel with Sue Benson, designer of the spectacular London 2012 equestrian cross-country course in historic Greenwich Park.

It is 51 weeks to the minute since Zara Phillips charged around the daunting 5,728-metre circuit on High Kingdom, en route to the clear round that thrilled more than 50,000 spectators and inspired the home team, who went on to take the silver medals in the three-day eventing competition, behind Germany.

Yet the emotion in Benson's voice as she discusses the day to which she devoted six years of her life is still raw; it was May 2013 before she felt able to consign the newspaper cuttings and other items that make up her personal record of the experience to a series of scrapbooks.

By David Owen in Olympia

It is a fantasy moment for true believers in Olympic legacy.

Amid ancient columns, as the call of a million cicadas fills the air, young wrestlers go through their moves in red and blue one-piece outfits.

The venue – the palaistra at Olympia in Greece – is perhaps 2,300 years old.

By Mike Rowbottom

As the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow loom on the horizon, England's netball team appear better placed than ever before to challenge the traditional dominance of the perennial - all right, quadrennial - world champions. Namely New Zealand or Australia, who have passed the trophy above England's straining grasp since the World Championships began in 1963.

Since that first event, in Eastbourne, only one other nation has featured on the winning step of the podium - although when Trinidad and Tobago earned that honour in 1979 they had to share that top step with - yes, New Zealand and Australia.