On Thursday (May 13) Doha is due to host the opening Diamond League meeting of the season at the Qatar Sports Club Stadium.

Suddenly the handshake between Thomas Bach and Besim Hasani was not happening any more. The hand of the upwardly mobile International Olympic Committee vice president had halted in mid-air - at the point where Hasani had introduced himself as "President of the Kosovo Olympic Committee (KOC)."

In early 1964, John Coates reportedly took a day off school to watch Richie Benaud play his last Test match. A photograph in the next day’s Sydney Morning Herald pictured him alongside the Australian cricket captain as they left the pitch.

A year before he ran the 1982 Boston Marathon, Dick Beardsley had shared his first victory over 26.2 miles at the inaugural London Marathon, holding hands with Norway’s Inge Simonsen as they crossed the line together.

How many Olympians have owned horses in the Grand National, the gruelling Liverpool steeplechase whose 2022 edition took place yesterday? My supposition would be very few.

On a junior school playground in Buckinghamshire, long, long ago, overly-excited groups of children opposed each other, chanting, respectively and in the main ignorantly: "Cam-bridge! Cam-bridge!" and "Ox-ford!" "Ox-ford!"

In September, the World Curling Federation (WCF) will have a new face as their President, with the 12-year reign of Kate Caithness set to come to an end.

Morinari Watanabe has enjoyed much success since being elected as President of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) in October 2016 - but the jury remains out on his parkour initiative of 2017.

It is now 30 years since an Olympic gold medal became the ultimate prize in badminton, yet the All England Open Badminton Championships - the oldest tournament in the sport - retains its own special place.

Ragnhild Myklebust, named last month as one of the first two Para-athletes to earn the PLY post-nominal letters after their name, did not let this inhibit her comment on the governing body’s volte face over allowing Russian and Belarus athletes to compete at the Beijing 2022 Winter Paralympics.

Tomorrow marks the 50^th anniversary of the signing of the Shanghai Communique in which the United States and China pledged to work towards the normalisation of relations following the strange but effective table tennis initiative that has come to be known as Ping Pong Diplomacy.

Fifty years ago this week, the Scottish rugby union team refused to travel to Dublin to play a match in the Five Nations Championship after some players received death threats.

Figure skating at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics is currently convulsed with the case of the Russian Olympic Committee's 15-year-old Kamila Valieva, whose eligibility to compete in the women's event is due to be determined by a Court of Arbitration for Sport panel tomorrow.

The first question to be asked about the women's ice hockey competition now underway at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games is an all-too-familiar one: will gold go to the United States or to Canada?