The gift-giving season is fast approaching; so in the spirit of ‘news you can use’, I have put together a Top Dozen list of great sporting reads.

Never mind the electoral hullabaloo that has been going on across the Atlantic. The Big Vote is about to happen in the UK.

Lima’s Westin Hotel, September 12 next year, picture it if you will on the eve of the vote to decide the host of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The Opening Ceremony is one of the most-watched events of the Olympic Games. 

Is this new age of comparative austerity killing off the signature, knock-‘em-dead, Bird’s Nest-style Olympic stadium?

Control the controllable.

To judge by the swiftly growing number of outraged comments already assembled on Dawn.com, the website of Pakistan's oldest and most widely read English-language newspaper, the book published this week about the nation's squash legend Jahangir Khan is a particularly disrespectful and damaging hatchet job.

Talk about coming back with a bang.

I would not call myself a current West Ham United fan - I haven’t blown a bubble at one of their games for several years - but I remain a long-time admirer of the football they used to play, and occasionally still try to do.

Last week’s World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Independent Observers report into drugs testing procedures at Rio 2016 felt like a snapshot of every major story we have written this year.

If you want a near-perfect example of how some major sporting governing bodies appear to view image and perception as more important than honesty and clarity, look no further than the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) response to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Independent Observers (IO) report from Rio 2016.

I don’t know about you but I’m fairly certain UK Athletics chairman Ed Warner wouldn’t have made-up what he, as a minimum, thought he heard about Qatar paying bribes to land the 2017 International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Championships. Having said that, I am not saying that Sebastian Coe is not telling the truth; or, indeed, the other four witnesses the IAAF’s Ethics Board spoke with about the issue.

Recent scandals amongst high-profile sports governing bodies have thrown the global spotlight onto sports governance . The FIFA revelations proved especially shocking. 

The current blizzard of retrospective doping bans being meted out by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is making the process of clarifying who ends up with what at recent Games resemble studying the Premier League table on a Saturday evening - or of course a Sunday, Monday, or any other evening and what a shame for the TV marketing men that there are only seven of them in each week…