In the sport's corridors of power, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) wields tremendous influence.

A year ago, almost to the day, I was sitting in my Lausanne hotel-room writing up an interview I had just done with an Alibaba executive called Chris Tung.

By the stretch of anyone’s imagination, Donald Trump, soon to be the ex-President of the United States, could not be called a good sport. His hysterical reaction to being kicked into touch by Democrat Joe Biden is a sure indication that he has patented the art of being a sore loser.

Following today’s news that the hugely popular and influential British athletics coach Lloyd Cowan had died at the age of 58, his lifelong friend Shaun Pickering pointed up a post he had put up on Facebook just a few days ago.

Nine VIPs - go on, count them - appended comments to a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) media release headlined, "Tributes pour in for retiring WADA Board member and founding President Richard Pound".

Richard Pound’s comments this week suggesting athletes could secure priority access for vaccines ahead of Tokyo 2020 seemed poorly timed, rather than being a completely outrageous suggestion.

All roads will hopefully lead to Tokyo in 2021, but there is another important Olympic destination this year.

When you postpone an Olympic Games for the first time in peacetime it's hardly surprising that there is a whole host of unintended consequences that start to jump out at you. Fortunately, they are not all bad ones.

And so Summer Olympic and Paralympic year has dawned. For the second year running.

Back in the day, as they say today - it was the late 1980s as I recall - a young lad of about 10 approached me in the street and asked for my autograph. I was somewhat taken aback, as I was hardly on the A-list. 

When Geoff Capes - who, surprisingly, has been the official British shot put record holder for the last 40 years - turned down my eager request for an autograph after a meeting at Crystal Palace in the 1970s it was an early lesson that access to sporting figures cannot be taken for granted.

It was pointed out by our editor Duncan Mackay that yesterday marked the anniversary that I joined insidethegames back in 2015, alongside my colleague Liam Morgan.

A crowd of more than 86,000 spectators cheering on a sporting event is almost unimaginable now.

Three hundred and sixty-four days after it was originally to have been carried there, the arrival of the Olympic flame at Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium on July 23 is set to be one of the sporting highlights of this new year, providing everything goes to plan.