The gymnastics career of Vera Caslavska, the seven-time Olympic champion who died this week aged 74, will live on in history. But above and beyond her sporting achievement is the memory of how she effectively ended that career at the 1968 Mexico Games with a podium protest against the Soviet Union, whose forces had invaded her homeland of Czechoslovakia two months earlier.

By turns magical and frustrating in both preparation and execution, the Games of the XXXI Olympiad are now in the record books. International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach chose his words very carefully to describe them.

Sebastian Coe accomplished many things as an athlete, but his defining moment came at the 1980 Moscow Games when his expected victory in the 800m turned into one of the worst experiences of his sporting life; he responded by winning the 1500m that was supposed to have been property of Steve Ovett.

When the French director Marcel Camus took the classic Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice to a Brazilian favela in the late 1950s, he created a film that would not only beguile Barack Obama and his mother, but would make a little bit of Olympic history. 

As the Rio 2016 swimming programme got underway this weekend, the ripples were still spreading from the August 1 premiere airing at the Los Angeles Film Festival of The Last Gold.

This is a documentary on the victory earned by the United States women’s 4x100 metre freestyle team at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, against the East German athletes who otherwise swept the board at those Games through what we now know were illegal means.

The 2016 Rio Games are already unique. No other Games in modern history has had its build-up vexed by such a bewildering mass of political frictions, economic shocks and doping controversies. But as the Games of the XXXI Olympiad shift into delivery mode with Friday’s Opening Ceremony, there is the guarantee of something beautiful being presented to the watching world.

Even 80 years on, the Berlin Games of 1936 remain the most controversial and most talked about in the history of the modern Olympic movement. 

Forty years ago modern pentathlon made headlines as never before after a scandal which rocked the entire Olympic world.

The International Golf Federation (IGF) and its President Peter Dawson should, in the words of the famous Kool and the Gang hit from 1980, be celebrating good times as the sport prepares to make its Olympic return after a 112-year hiatus from the programme.

Is Yulia Stepanova, the Russian 800m runner whose whistleblowing activity triggered the scandal which has resulted in Russia’s track-and-field athletes being suspended from international competition including the forthcoming Rio Olympics, a “Judas” or a “true Olympic hero”?

In the Ancient Olympic Games, the athletes came to live and compete together in Ancient Olympia, but at most early Games of the Modern era, those taking part did not live in an Olympic Village but in hotel accommodation around the host city.

Australia’s Olympic TV network, 7Olympics, has just put out a short clip of footage from the London 2012 Olympics featuring home race walker Jared Tallent en route to his eventual golden glory in the 50km race walk - eventual in the sense that he had to wait until June 17, 2016, 1,405 days later, to claim the medal originally won by Sergey Kirdyapkin.

South Africa's six-times Paralympic gold medallist Oscar Pistorius is due to face a sentencing hearing tomorrow (June 13) for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine's Day in 2013.

Ottavio Cinquanta, elected President of the International Skating Union (ISU) in 1994, will belatedly step down this week as the ISU Congress in Dubrovnik elects his successor.

Cristiano Ronaldo comes into the reckoning, but if you were to say that Lionel Messi and Neymar Jr were among the three best footballers in the world right now you would not get many arguments.