Bar one, I have covered every Olympic Games since Tokyo in 1964. The one I missed was Atlanta 1996, when I was sports editing The Observer. Colleagues who were there tell me I was a good judge.

In all those Games, I have also covered every Olympic sport. Bar one.

Football.

I have never had the inclination, or been requested, to attend the Olympic football tournament. There simply has been no interest in it in this country, probably because Britain wasn't involved.

This may change next year of course when, for the first time since 1960 a Team GB - of sorts - will line up against some of the world's best under-23 players in a competition (the women's event has no age limit) in which the London organiser are finding an embarrassingly hard sell.

I can understand why. For me, Olympic football lacks substance and credibility and should not be on the Games menu.

The Olympics do not need football any more than they need equestrianism, tennis, beach volleyball or, when they debut in Rio in 2016, rugby sevens and golf.

These are sports that are cluttering up the already overcrowded Olympic theatre - in the case of rugby sevens and golf at the expense of some disciplines in worthier sports like track cycling, judo and sailing.

But that's a personal view.

As far as Olympic footy is concerned, I doubt if anyone actually cares about it other than those involved.

Can you name the current Olympic football champions without Googling? The answer is Argentina.


But even the most ardent Argentinean fan would tell you that what matters to them is not winning the Olympic tournament but the World Cup. The Olympics are a second-rate sideshow for football, just as they are for tennis and will be for golf.

However, we are stuck with them and whatever sort of football team Stuart Pearce manages to scrabble together for 2012  - whether it shapes up as GB United or more like Man United - the one certainty is that a 37-year-old David Beckham will not only be one of the three permitted overage players but will probably lead it.

While Pearce says he has a free hand over selection (though he will need to call the misplaced Anglophobic bluff of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland FAs), there is no doubt he will be "leaned on" to pick Becks.

With 1.7 million tickets still to sell for the football competition Games organisers, the FA and the British Olympic Association (BOA) know the publicity value of such an iconic figure is immense. Moreover, I would not be surprised if Beckham is not already in pole position to be Britain's flag-bearer at the Opening Ceremony next July as a reward for his part in helping London win the bid and his current work as a global ambassador.


Lord Coe's team have been fulsome in their praise of Beckham's contribution and the BOA are certainly keen to see football play a high-profile role in a GB team's return to the Olympics after more than 60 years, if only to answer Arsène Wenger's jibe that the Games are "for track and field only". Apparently, what Wenger actually knows about the Olympics could be written on the back of an Arsenal season ticket.

What a slur on the likes of Steve Redgrave, Chris Hoy, Ben Ainslie and James DeGale. They actually won hardware, something which these days appears to be beyond the reach of Wenger.

To have Beckham leading from the front may be contentious but so is the whole question of fielding a GB team.

They say controversy sells but so far, it hasn't shifted many tickets for the 2012 football tournament.

Things may perk up if Pearce picks Beckham to play alongside Ryan Giggs and Wayne Rooney as the three overage squad members.


Sir Alex Ferguson may argue there is no way Rooney could participate in both European Championships and the Olympics next year, but why not? He may recall that Cristiano Ronaldo did precisely that in 2004.

And as for players from the other Home Nations, notably Welshmen Giggs, Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey and Scots Charlie Adam and Darren Fletcher, being intimidated by their governing bodies, let's remember that Argentina became Olympic champions in Beijing with the assistance of the great Lionel Messi, who won a legal battle against his club, Barcelona, for refusing him permission to take part.

I suggest that if any chosen Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish players - men and women - stand firm, there's nothing their governing bodies dare do about it. The phrase nose and face comes to mind if they considered banning them from future international tournaments.

I also wonder whether it would have helped had the FA not settled on an Englishman, albeit an intensely patriotic one in "Psycho" Pearce, to take charge of Team GB


Fergie was initially approached by Lord Coe but declined as he reckoned her would still be too busy with Manchester United next year. Yet wouldn't the Ulsterman Martin O'Neill, currently available, have been a greater unifying influence?

As it happens these arguments are academic, rather like the football tournament itself.

I wish Teams GB of both sexes well and that those worthy of selection get their places and enjoy the Olympic experience. But sorry, I won't be watching.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.

With little more than 300 days to go until the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games get under way, focusing on life after London might seem like the sporting equivalent of looking at the menu and then asking for the bill.

But for those of us in the UK Talent Team, our day-to-day activities are fixed on Rio 2016 and recruiting the next generation of athletes that will try to emulate the success we hope to see Great Britain achieve in London.

The UK Talent Team is a joint venture between UK Sport and the English Institute of Sport (EIS) and works with national governing bodies to support their talent identification and development activities.

It is a key part of the high-performance system and uses detailed analysis to identify and develop talent. In recent years, it has run a series of programmes to spot athletes with the capability to succeed in Olympic and Paralympic sports.


Our programmes often focus on attributes that can be transferred across sports and may entail a person switching from one discipline to another. One of our most successful examples of this was Sporting Giants, which, in 2008, identified someone who played hockey and did cross-country running to a high standard, yet demonstrated the physical attributes required for rowing. That person was Helen Glover (pictured, above right) and, after a successful transition into rowing, she recently won a silver medal at the 2011 World Championships in Bled, Slovenia.

Planning for 2016 is in full swing and, over three recent weekends, we have held assessment days for more than 300 athletes at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, Lee Valley Athletics Centre and the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, as part of our new Power2Podium initiative.

Power2Podium aims to recruit athletes with speed and power, and assess their suitability for joining talent-development programmes in one of athletics, sprint canoeing, sprint cycling, weightlifting, skeleton, bobsleigh and rugby sevens.

Attendees at the assessment days have been selected after completion of an initial questionnaire and come from a range of speed- and power-based disciplines. The day consists of speed, power and strength tests to assess potential.  The results are collected, analysed and benchmarked against the scores of athletes already in the talent pool for each of the seven sports.


Candidates that match or better the scores of those currently in the talent system will come into consideration for phase two and will be given the opportunity to take part in an assessment camp.

Three more assessment days are planned in Stirling, Leeds and Loughborough, and, by the end of October, we will have looked at more than 1,000 men and women, aged 15-26.

Olympic 200 metres silver medallist, Darren Campbell (pictured, below), attended the first assessment day at Crystal Palace and spent time talking to the candidates about his experiences of switching from football to athletics, what it takes to become an Olympian and the transformation in the level of support provided to athletes compared to when he started out.


Representatives from the seven Power2Podium sports have also attended. Ben Ryan, head coach of England Rugby Sevens, who came to Crystal Palace, told me: "Initiatives like Power2Podium are a great way of enhancing and complementing our existing talent-development programmes, and ensuring we leave no stone unturned.  They give us the opportunity to assess athletes who may have all the physical attributes to succeed in our sport, it's just that they have never had the opportunity or the inclination to sample it."

Feedback from across the sports has been positive and an initial look at the test results for the first three assessment days indicate some of the candidates are delivering test results that match the scores of those already in the talent system.

The success of previous talent campaigns, which have produced 65 international medals at junior, U23 and senior level, including 13 at World Championships, give us every reason to be hopeful that Power2Podium will add to the haul.

Who knows?  It could be that we have already uncovered - or are about to find - someone who will be standing on the podium at Rio 2016. Of course, when that moment comes, my colleagues and I in the UK Talent Team will already be focused on 2020!

Natalie Dunman is lead talent scientist at the English Institute of Sport.

Imagine you are a young, male footballer - under 23, in fact - and you have been invited to play for Team GB at the London 2012 Games in what will be the first British representation in the Olympic football tournament since 1960.

But there are problems.

First problem. Your club is planning to whisk you and your team-mates away pre-season – that is, during the Olympic competition which starts on July 25 - for an all-expenses paid working holiday in south-east Asia, where your coiffed profile, and that of your compadres, will generate many millions of pounds worth of revenue for your employers so that they may service a debt which is bigger than planet earth.

Second problem. You are Scottish. This is not an intrinsic problem, of course. But in context it is, because although the Scottish Football Association have agreed, between gritted teeth, and with the memory still vivid of Lionel Messi's court action against his club to oblige them to let him represent Argentina at the Olympics, that they can't actually stop any individual player who wants to step up and represent the Union flag at the home Olympics, they still hate the idea. And anyone playing the token Scot so that the Sassenachs can feel good about their little English British team will be regarded with about as much goodwill as the signatories of the Act of Union.

So, two big problems. But if anybody could fix them, you would think, it is the man who was today officially named as coach to the men's Team GB players in London 2012 - Stuart Pearce, whose nickname of Psycho, which accompanied him through an illustrious playing career with Coventry City, Nottingham Forest, West Ham United, Manchester City and England, tells you a little about the intensity of his commitment to whatever cause he was fighting for.

It is tempting, therefore, to imagine Pearce – a man whose surname, as I have just randomly discovered, is but one consonant away from his antithesis - persuading young players to embrace the Olympic spirit through the following means: grabbing them by the collar and inflicting upon them a rant of eye-bulging urgency with an accompanying suggestion about what might happen if the result should turn out, at the end of the day, and when all has been bellowed and done, to be anything other than the right one.

But of course Pearce no longer rampages gloriously across the playing fields of England admonishing his less thorough and strenuous team-mates of their failings. The man who once advertised his services as an electrician in the Nottingham Forest programme has since acquainted himself with the complex wiring which confronts any manager of men.



In recent years too, as coach to the England under-21 team, he has encountered the managerial cold shoulder when it comes to requesting players for his squad, a shoulder offered recently by Manchester United's manager Sir Alex Ferguson following a request for the services of the young forward Danny Welbeck – whose recent treble pay rise is unlikely to make him any less difficult to tear away from Old Trafford in the near future.

Psycho has had to get smarter to get his results – and to develop a more thoughtful approach which was evident at today's press conference within the dark and labyrinthine innards of Wembley Stadium.

He spoke of the way in which he and his female counterpart for London 2012, Hope Powell, had bought into the Olympic ideal. Both were adamant, for instance, that wherever possible, Team GB's footballers would reside in the Olympic Village.

Having insisted that players from all the Home nations had equal chances to force their way into his squad - "I'm certainly not coming into this job looking to only select England players" – he then dealt with a classic double question as one of the attending media followed up.

Did he then feel obliged to pick Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish players in his squad?

"I don't feel obliged to pick anybody, even Englishmen" he replied.

So it was possible, our questioner continued, that there would be no Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish players in the squad?

Woo-oo, woo-oo, danger, danger...!!

"It's possible there will be no English in the squad," replied Psycho with a little grin. We knew it wasn't that likely either – but his footwork was immaculate.


Pearce was similarly adept in facing the question of whether David Beckham (pictured above with Pearce), who is looking increasingly unlikely to figure in the Euro 2012 England squad, would have his frequently expressed wish of representing Britain at the Olympics.

"I've no idea as yet," Pearce responded matter-of-factly. "To be honest with you, I've not seen him play recently – he's a bit too old to play for the under-21s, so he's not been on my radar..."

So what tactics will the Artist formerly known as Psycho deploy as he attempts to assemble a winning squad for 2012. In his own phrase – "common sense and dialogue."

It's not swashbuckling stuff. It's not scoring that penalty against Spain in Euro 96. But it is what is required, and there is no other way.

His suggestion, half serious, that inclusion in Team GB - which is scheduled to play a couple of friendlies before the Games begin, one of which will probably be a double-header with the women's Team GB side – will mean young players are effectively getting some high profile pre-season training may not cut too much ice.

Pearce's trump card, however, could yet be to inspire some of the idealism in his prospective young selections that clearly operates in his own heart. He really does seem to carry a special feeling for what he calls this "one-off opportunity". And when he says that, if he were still playing, he would jump at the chance, you absolutely believe him.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the past five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames. Rowbottom's Twitter feed can be accessed here. 

These are deeply troubling times for sport. Is dishonesty becoming the name of the games people play?

The question is disturbingly pertinent because of the escalating number of incidents involving allegations of wrongdoing, in one form or another, that are permeating the whole spectrum of the sporting world.

It is hard to find a sport left untainted. Well, we have yet to hear of corruption in croquet or skulduggery in synchronised swimming, but these days sleaze has become alarmingly widespread.

All too frequently sport is on the front pages rather than the back with lurid tales of fixes, bungs, doping, bribing, cheating, you name it.

At the time of writing, there is a court case going in London involving three Pakistani cricketers on alleged corruption charges; Wayne Rooney's father and uncle were among nine men arrested by Merseyside police investigating an alleged betting scam in Scottish football when a particular player would be sent off (at odds of 10-1)  and we are awaiting a report following an investigation by the international amateur boxing body AIBA into alleged attempts to fix it so that boxers from Azerbaijan win gold medals in the 2012 Olympics. Not to mention the backhanders that have bedevilled FIFA and the last World Cup bid.

That word "alleged" is now one of the most frequently used in the sporting lexicon. There are dark clouds of suspicion everywhere and so much of it has to do with big money betting

If I was a gambling man, I'd like to wager that the biggest concern facing London 2012 is not terrorism, transportation foul-ups or an infestation of drugs cheats but the threat of major betting scams.


No wonder IOC President Jacques Rogge (pictured) has asked Games organisers to be especially vigilant in keeping a watch on betting patterns and anomalies in wagering, notably spot bets on the global market.

All competitors, coaches, officials VIPS, - even journalists - are technically prohibited from any betting activity betting associated with the Olympics under IOC "protocol".

The IOC have set-up a Swiss-base monitoring unit to gather information about potential gambling corruption and under the UK Gambling Act all British-based bookmakers are legally required to report any "irregular" bets.

But many major bookmaking firms now base themselves offshore and are not bound by the Act. Which, apparently, because of Parliamentary procedures, the Government cannot amend until after the Olympics.

So loopholes exist because the IOC do not have the right to monitor all bets placed during the Games.

Most of the betting scams originate in the Far East and I know from my own experience of working there just how devious the gambling syndicates can be. This is something of which the IOC are intensely aware.

If pressure can be put on cricketers to deliberately bowl no-balls, how easy would it be to bribe athletes to deliberately make false starts, or tennis players to double fault?

Another slice of sleaze involves more allegations of wrong-doing in snooker, the BBC commentator and former player, Willie Thorne, claiming that match-fixing is endemic and that the sport may never be rid of the taint of corruption. There have long been question marks over the green baize game with John Higgins' six months suspension for failing to report an attempt to fix one of his matches, the most recent high-profile scandal.

"Match fixing has always been part of snooker and I don't know how you can stamp it out," says Thorne. "There have always been games that you knew the result of before they began and I know that a couple of mine were bent from the start.  I don't think the authorities can ever stop it."

Of course, sport has never been all sweetness and light. Back in the days of the ancient Greeks there were plenty of dodgy goings-on too.

If you look back over the past few years, the incidents that have sullied sport are numerous, ranging from drugs cheating to a Formula One team instructing one of their drivers to deliberately crash into a wall and change the course of the race and the entire Grand Prix season.

While we watch the final enactment of the current Rugby World Cup, it is not easy to forget that two years ago Harlequins used fake blood to create a dodgy player swap and even in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago, England players were caught out trying to illegally change the ball.


Now we hear that the Wales coach Warren Gatland (pictured left) has admitted he considered cheating in the semi-final against France by ordering a player to fake injury. He decided against it, he says, but the fact he even thought about it a disquieting sign of these unsporting times.

And what is happening in cricket, well, just isn't cricket. During a one-day game between India and Pakistan, some £650 million ($11 billion/€745 million) was bet in the city of Mumbai alone. It is estimated that in the India subcontinent the betting industry is worth £40 billion ($63 billion/€46 billion) a year.

Much of the corruption that has already been exposed in major sport is just the tip of the iceberg.  Moneymaking scams unquestionably are prevalent and the opportunities of cashing in on novelty bets, like the number of no-balls bowled, red cards issued and easy pots missed are copious and usually untraceable.

And we haven't even touched upon the rigging of horse races.

When the esteemed Clare Balding (pictured) once sniffily dismissed boxing as "dirty and corrupt" the phrase pots and kettles immediately sprang to mind.


Has there been a more crooked sport than horseracing? History suggests not.

Ok, so pro boxing may have had its share of shady dealings in the past, most notably pre-war when the Mafia virtually ran the sport in the United States but as I have written here before in the half century I have been at ringside I am convinced I have never seen a fixed fight - and I am one of life's natural cynics. Mismatches yes; but no contrived "dives".

However, I do reckon I have seen racehorses pulled and at least one Grand Slam tennis final [in Paris] when it was evident that a player went "into the tank".

Inevitably, it is the massive influx of money that has totally changed the face of sport.  There's that old Yorkshire saying, "Where there's muck, there's brass"; now it seems to be a case of "Where there's brass, there's muck."

Fancy a bet?

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.

Sometimes it is best not to Google the place you are soon to be visiting; a rule probably applies more than most to Mexico.

A brief online search of the country told me that drug trafficking and organised crime are increasingly a major source of violent random attacks in Mexico, especially in major urban centres.

One of the more unnerving news articles I came across told of how just last month, a group of gangsters dumped some 35 battered corpses out of a van into the middle of a highway during rush hour.

I decided to narrow my search to Guadalajara, the Mexican city I would be visiting for just under a month for the 2011 Pan American Games and was relieved to find that the competition was "expected to provide relief from the daily mass killings and kidnappings in a country savaged by drug-related violence that has killed more than 35,000 people since late 2006."

This is because the Organising Committee have pumped $10 million (£6.4 million/€7.3 million) into a plan that calls for 10,000 municipal state and Federal police, as well as elements from the Mexican army and navy, to patrol Guadalajara's streets 24 hours per day during the competition.

There were also major construction delays in Guadalajara, to the point where the Telmex Athletics Stadium was completed less than a week before the start of competition, but this was no great problem considering that the city was on red alert to make sure I didn't add to Mexico's alarming death toll.

So all seemed well. That was until on route to Guadalajara; I stopped over briefly in Los Angeles only to hear that the tail end of Hurricane Jova was battering Mexico's Pacific Coast and producing heavy rain around some of the key sporting venues for the Pan American Games.

It was not long after that I arrived in Guadalajara to find the reports were irritatingly accurate and that rain was pelting down with relenting force.

And following a soaking-wet walk to the Main Press Centre (MPC) later that day – due to the fact that I hadn't packed an umbrella - I discovered that the Opening Ceremony may be shortened or even cancelled due to the horrific weather.

But as the day of reckoning arrived, something rather miraculous happened.

The rain suddenly stopped and the sun came out to dry Guadalajara's streets almost instantaneously and the Opening Ceremony at the 50,000 capacity Omnilife Stadium appeared as if it was never in doubt.

The venue itself is one of the more remarkable structures I have seen. It rather looks like a space shuttle that has landed on top of a giant hill.


But one thing is for certain, it can host a spectacular Opening Ceremony.

Mexican tradition set the backdrop for a quite wonderful display of music, dancing, fireworks and even Mexican vaqueros - better known as cowboys - riding their horses at a quick gallop around the centre of the arena in front of the loudest, most deafening crowd I remember sitting among.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge and the Mexican President Felipe Calderón were also spectators of the wonderful event (the latter officially declaring the 2011 Pan American Games open) and so far, things have gone extremely well.

The sport has been top class, the arenas have been world class and as an added bonus the sun has been out for every day of the competition brightening the colourful city where stereotypes like tacos, tequila and Tapatio really are out in force.

That is not to say everything is absolutely perfect.

The transport system hasn't exactly run like clockwork on the busy roads and there have been some technical difficulties – not least the internet continuously going down in the MPC on the first few days here, which I assure you is a journalist's worst nightmare!

The issue of contaminated meat containing the performance-enhancing drug clenbuterol has also reared its ugly head with 19 of the 24 teams from the FIFA Under-17 World Cup in Mexico earlier this year having just returned positive doping tests though assurances have been made by the Organising Committee that meat supplies in the Athletes' Village are 100 per cent clean.

But overall, things have been impressive for an event that must continually excel to justify its existence on an increasingly hectic sporting calendar that includes the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games, the Asian Games, multiple World Championships, various national competitions and a whole host of other sporting events that fill the demands of elite athletes.

That is the main reason why Usain Bolt isn't here competing for Jamaica in athletics and why Michael Phelps didn't come to Guadalajara for the swimming event.

So is it still a relevant event?

It is a question I levelled at Michael Fennell, a man rather qualified to answer as the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) President, Jamaican Olympic Association (JOA) President, the Pan American Games Organisation (PASO) vice-president and perhaps most tellingly in this case, the PASO Technical Commission chairman for Guadalajara 2011.

"The Pan American Games obviously takes place the year before the Summer Olympic Games and therefore acts as the perfect dress-rehearsal for all the countries and the top athletes," Fennell told me here in the Mexican city.

"Obviously this year the event is being held in October which is a bad time of year for some sports, particularly athletics, but you have 36 sports on the programme here and so while some sports may not be at full strength, the majority are at full strength and you also have athletes here looking to secure Olympic qualifying spots and to finalise their preparations for the Olympics.

"So I think if you ask any of the 42 nations competing here if they find this to be a relevant competition and one that is important for them, they would all answer that it certainly is."


Fennell's comments were quickly backed by Ian Troop, the chief executive of the Toronto 2015 Pan American Games who will next stage the next edition of the competition.

"This is the second biggest big multi-sport event in the world and it will be the biggest ever Games in Canada, including the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games, which shows you the sheer scale," Troop explained.

"It is a great stand-alone competition with some outstanding athletes and it also provides an opportunity to celebrate the very vibrant cultures that exist in Pan American.

"There is an element of this being a warm up for the Olympics but that can only be a good thing and major benefit for all the teams and athletes that want to be involved in the Olympics.

"Guadalajara have done a great job with the 'look and feel' because it really does look like there is a major event happening right here now.

"The Opening Ceremony was great – creative but simple with the audience involved – and it is fantastic to see the amount of patriotism from the Mexican fans that I know we will see in Toronto.

"So I think Guadalajara is doing a great job with what is most definitely a magnificent attractive, compelling, relevant event.

"Our job is to pick up the baton and take it a step further in four years' time when the competition will be equally important for everyone involved."

So the view from the ground here appears unequivocally to be that the second largest multi-sport event on the planet is still very much relevant on the sporting map.

And if Guadalajara can continue in the same vain they have started; the Pan American Flame will move on to Toronto 2015 burning as brightly as ever.

Tom Degun is a reporter for insidethegames 

What does the scoreline 43-31 mean to you?

If you are a rugby fan, particularly a French one, it will conjure up memories of the 1999 rugby World Cup semi-final in which France came from behind to upset Jonah Lomu and the New Zealand All Blacks in quite the most astonishing rugby match ever played.

We will no doubt be hearing about this rather a lot this week, with the two teams set to clash again, this time in the 2011 rugby World Cup final.

But I have yet to hear anyone predict a classic on anything like the level of the one those of us at Twickenham were lucky enough to witness 12 years ago.

Which is a pity, because this year's tournament in New Zealand could do with finishing on a high note.

The less than enthralling nature – so far - of the current World Cup, plus the news that the next one, according to The Guardian, "had been under threat because the three major southern-hemisphere unions all said they would not be able to afford to take part under the current financial formula", has set me wondering whether a cricket-type scenario might not be poised to unfold in rugby.

By this I mean a situation in which a foreshortened version of the game acquires so much momentum that it threatens to become the sport's dominant format.

It is, after all, now less than five years before rugby – or to be precise, rugby sevens – returns to the Olympic Games.

So we can expect lots of development funding to be channelled into this version of the game, particularly outside the half-dozen or so nations which constitute the traditional rugby powers.

When I interviewed him 18 or so months ago, Bernard Lapasset, the International Rugby Board's President, acknowledged that the Olympics "offer the possibility of making rugby known all over the world".

He went on: "There are countries who will prefer in the short term to invest in sevens to get a competitive team quickly.

"I think Kenya will put a little more money into sevens because they know that their team will perhaps be more competitive in the short term and could get an Olympic medal.

"The same with Fiji.

"There are countries who may make that choice."


He was, nonetheless, not of the opinion that sevens might overtake the 15-a-side game.

"The systems of competition are extremely different," he said.

"Also 15-a-side remains the technical and tactical reference-point.

"What is important for us is to know how financially we are going to turn rugby sevens professional...

"For the moment, it's a sport that is 95 percent amateur.

So there isn't that professional dimension that could enable sevens to rival 15-a-side in terms of players deciding whether to play seven or 15-a-side.

"At the moment they don't have the choice.

"A player who wants a career in rugby has to play 15-a-side because it's regular, structured, there are competitions.

"That will take time."

Yes, it will take time.

And there are other relevant differences between rugby's situation and cricket's: Twenty20 cricket involves the same number of players as the Test match format; you can play rugby in the rain; long-form rugby matches do not last five days.

Nonetheless, if I were a super-rich investor itching to be the Roman Abramovich of rugby, I fancy I might be considering ways of getting in early and supercharging the seven-a-side format, rather than simply investing in one of the top traditional rugby clubs.


The Hong Kong Sevens, which I have not attended but which I have heard nothing but good things about, shows what is already possible.

Attach the five Olympic rings – with their guarantee of substantial international media exposure once every four years - to the sport's calling card and growth could be a lot more rapid than people might think.

And, once interest has been aroused, other potential plus-points of the format – it is more school-friendly, more accessible to the casual viewer, less likely to face problems arising from serious scrum-related injuries – may more readily come into their own.

Plus, of course, if we are thinking about a future involving professional sevens teams, they are potentially cheaper, since you have half as many players to pay as a 15-a-side rugby team.

Rugby sevens is set for a period of growth, of that there can be little doubt.

The interesting question is whether that will fuel interest in the 15-a-side game, or replace it.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed here

Nike, one of Paula Radcliffe's main sponsors, has instigated a Twitter campaign - #historystands - to support her quest to get the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to reverse its new ruling that women's marathon times set in mixed races are reclassified as "world bests" rather than "world records".

Well, it would, wouldn't it?

Commercially, having a world record holder is better than having a world best holder.

And although Radcliffe still holds that distinction, thanks to her time of 2 hours 17min 42sec set in a women's only race at the 2005 running of the London Marathon, that mark is within range now for a number of leading female marathon runners - including Mary Jepkosgei Keitany, who was just 97 seconds adrift in winning this year's women's race in London with 2:19.19, and Russia's Liliya Shobukhova, who indicated her growing stature by winning the admittedly mixed race in Chicago last Sunday in 2:18.20.

Radcliffe's stance has attracted the support of organisers of the world's top marathons, including Dave Bedford, race director for the London Marathon, although that again is a partly self-interested position to take. No race director wants to see the records set at his or her marathon effectively downgraded - why would they?


The British 37-year-old mother of two, back on course for an Olympic appearance on home soil at London 2012, can see her younger opponents nibbling away at her advantage. Reclaiming her record of 2:15:25 from the mixed London 2002 race would shift that prize significantly further away from her rivals.

The IAAF ruling, which comes into effect on January 1, 2012, cannot be changed until, at the earliest, the next IAAF Congress in 2013, by which time Radcliffe may or may not still be competing.

However, that didn't prevent her from travelling to Monaco this week to personally lobby the IAAF President, Lamine Diack on the topic. Radcliffe, fluent in French and bright as the North Star, is a formidable force both on and off the roads. But Diack didn't get where he is today without being a very wily politician.

So when Radcliffe came away reporting that Diack had appeared "understanding", and was now considering the situation, it could mean anything or nothing.

Commercial factors aside, Radcliffe's position has attracted widespread support from fellow athletes, as the Twitter feed makes plain. Mo Farah was the most recent of those enjoining followers to send a tweet of support to Radcliffe, and to follow the campaign.

The IAAF's decision was rooted in a desire to prevent women being effectively "towed" to new marks by male pacemakers - an option which those in women's only races, including those at the IAAF World Championships and the Olympic Games, do not have.

But it is not a happy position.


How, for instance, does this ruling sit with the pacemaking which has been a part of middle distance track world records since that fabled run of Roger Bannister's (pictured) at Iffley Road back in 1954?

Why is it OK to get towed to a world 10,000-metre record, but not a world marathon record?

More paranoid Britons might look at the IAAF ruling alongside the  decision to reclassify the cycling events after the 2004 Olympics, taking out the kilo - the 1km time trial at which Britain's Chris Hoy excelled - and, after the 2008 Games, the individual pursuit, at which Rebecca Romero was gold medallist.

They might also rope in this week's ruling that Wayne Rooney, England's paramount talent, must sit out the group qualification stages at next year's European Championships following his three-match ban for being sent off against Montenegro.

And more paranoid Britons might wonder if someone up there is out to get them.

But if that may be a line of enquiry too far, the IAAF position goes against a sense of natural justice. In the sport of athletics, records are retrospectively annulled for the taint of drugs. To put Radcliffe, and others, into this territory simply for toeing the line with fellow athletes who included men seems almost indecent.

And once this kind of retrospective manipulation starts, other injustices can follow. Retrospective judgment is often vexed, as the contrasting positions of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and it's contrary baby the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on the question of whether it is right to take away relay runners' medals if one of their number subsequently proves to have been doping.

The question of reassigning medals once one has been taken from a discovered doper has also proved to be a point of debate.

When the extent of the East German doping regime was discovered, almost a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there was a huge debate about effectively wiping a whole generation of sporting records, particularly in the field of athletics and swimming, the areas where the GDR was most ruthlessly effective in terms of results.

It is the collateral damage of such an exercise that is unjust. Who can know absolutely, for instance, if those promoted to glory are spotlessly clean themselves?


Once you start down the road of rewriting history, your mission soon becomes impossibly complex.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames. Rowbottom's Twitter feed can be accessed here.

The debate about the future of the Olympic Stadium illustrates a very simple sporting truth about this country. The one sport that makes money is football, but only at the highest level.

All other sports, including lower league football, struggle. Any attempt to make money and market a sport other than football, particularly athletics, is extremely difficult and can result in failure.

The Government forgot this sporting truth and the result is that the future of the Olympic Stadium is uncertain and the taxpayer may end up paying for its maintenance.

If you want to judge the dominance of football, look at what is happening to flat racing. At Ascot on Saturday (October 15) we shall have the new Champions Day. The great and good of flat racing including the Queen will be there, indeed she will present a Cup named after her. It will be the richest day's racing ever staged in this country with £3 million in prize money and the best flat racehorses from around Europe on show.

But observe how racing is presenting the day. It has been promoted as racing's equivalent of a day that combines the FA Cup Final with the final day of the Premiership season. It is part of racing's efforts to rebrand. The success of Cheltenham and the Grand National should not obscure the fact that racing, particularly the flat, has been in decline. The marketers the sport hired worked out that the problem was that the flat lacked a narrative and that it needed to borrow ideas from football.

Yes, the flat has great festivals starting at Newmarket with the Guineas and then through the summer, the Derby and the Oaks at Epsom, Royal Ascot, Goodwood, York and on to the St Leger in Doncaster. But there was no single day when the season came to a climax as football does.

In the past, this did not matter. Then three-year-olds went for the triple crown of the Guineas, the Derby and the St Leger. But now the Triple Crown is so tattered that no sensible owner covets it. Hence the need for a grand finale which can be presented as the crowning moment of the racing season. Racing is hopeful that this new Cup final day will work and is making strenuous efforts to promote it. Whether it does or not remains to be seen but the fact that racing is looking to a football idea to rebrand itself shows how the sport has changed and how football has become the religion of the country. Other sporting religions may survive but only if they pay homage to this greatest of British sporting gods.

Those involved in racing are too well aware of how this illustrates the dramatic change in sporting power in this country. As the Newmarket trainer John Godsen put it to me, "Well it's a strange thing. In the 1960s the Football Association went to the show jumping association and asked them how could they possibly get on as much terrestrial TV as show jumping did? The world has changed and our slice of terrestrial TV time and of the press is being challenged by football."


So much so that while the Premiership earns billions from television, and Liverpool wants an even bigger slice of the cake for the top clubs, Channel Four's coverage of racing is partially subsidised by the sport and the BBC has dramatically cut back on the number of racing days it shows.

It is against this background of the mighty power of football that the Government decided to build an Olympic Stadium. But it did not make sure that its main post-Olympic user would be a football club.

This could easily have been done had the original plans for the stadium followed that of Stad de France with retractable seating. This would have taken into account a modern trend in football stadiums in this country (i.e.no running tracks). For decades Wembley may have been the home of football, despite having a running track, but modern football fans and the bosses that control the game, abhor such cohabitation.

However, a Stade de France in Stratford was vetoed by the Treasury on the grounds that it would add £100 million to the Olympic budget. The Treasury, led by Gordon Brown, had always been lukewarm about the Games. Brown's great passion was getting the World Cup to England and another £100 million for the stadium was the last straw. I know this sounds ridiculous, given the total budget for the Games finally came to £9.3 billion, but that is how Brown and his civil servants minds worked.

How ironic this is now. The extra £100 million the Treasury would not sanction back in 2007 is now the figure being talked about to convert the Stadium and make it rentable once the Olympics are over. During this time the Olympic Stadium design has been through more reincarnations than most of us have had hot dinners, starting with a stadium that was meant to seat  80,000 and then scaled down to 20,000 after the Olympics for athletics use. That London needs a modern athletics stadium is a given. But athletics does not generate money and only football could cover the running costs of the Stadium. The Government just did not do its homework properly.

What is more, in building a Stadium like this in East London, it ignited ambitions and fears in several football clubs. Recall that it was the dream of Terry Brown and his co-owners of West Ham United to move into the new Stadium. That dream prompted Brown and his friends to sell the club to owners who thought that they could make a killing by moving into the new Stadium - a disastrous chain of events that has led to the present ownership.

And it is very clear that Tottenham Hotspur's real interest in moving from North London to the East End was denying West Ham this prize stadium with its excellent facilities and transport links. Indeed hours before the Government announced that the deal with West Ham had collapsed, Tottenham were ready to withdraw their legal challenge to the deal provided the Government gave them a letter of comfort regarding the running track. This letter would have said that the Government promised that, even if West Ham moved in, the running track would not be removed from the stadium for many years, possibly another 125 years.


As Daniel Levy, the shrewd Tottenham chairman saw it, West Ham with a running track would be condemned to play in an old fashioned stadium and would be no threat to Tottenham. For reasons that are not clear, the Government failed to provide such a letter, and instead decided the legal challenge was too onerous and the West Ham deal had to be killed.

But the fact that such a promise was not given suggests the Government has kept open the option of moving the track at some stage. If that is the case, then this Stadium story is far from over and we could have a replay of what happened in Manchester with the Commonwealth Games Stadium.

That Stadium was given to Manchester City on such advantageous terms that it was effectively a gift and David Bernstein, now Football Association chairman, then at City, is still immensely proud of having negotiated the deal. And the fact that City had a new stadium was critical in encouraging foreign investors to buy the club. For all the money Sheikh Mansour has lavished on City, he knew that he would not have to fund a new stadium. This football bride came with a nice dowry.

Given the way the Olympic Stadium story has gone, I can see the same thing happening in the East End, not right away but some years down the line. The scenario is this – post the Olympics, West Ham become tenants in the stadium and, after some years, persuade the Government to remove the running track. This would make the club very attractive to foreign investors, be they Middle Eastern or Eastern European, just as Terry Brown imagined it all those years ago.

I know that, as of now, everyone says that is impossible. But do not bet against it. This stadium mystery story could end with the sort of surprise Agatha Christie could not have plotted.

Mihir Bose is one of the world's most astute observers on politics in sport and, particularly, football. He formerly wrote for The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph, and was the BBC's head sports editor. Follow Mihir on twitter.

www.mihirbose.com

Barcelona showed that the Olympics can transform a city; every Summer Games since has underlined how difficult this trick is to pull off.

With the endless wrangling over the future of the Olympic Stadium - epitomised by this week's collapse of the original deal with West Ham football club - it is starting to look like London 2012 will be no exception.

We shouldn't be surprised.

"Doing a Barcelona" involves achieving a perfect balance between the stringent demands of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) - which has been spoilt for choice these past couple of decades when it comes to Host Cities - and the city's long-term needs.

In some ways, these tend to dovetail rather nicely.

Take transport, which ironically was the first big concern about a London Olympic bid.

The infrastructure required to bring thousands upon thousands of spectators with utmost efficiency to and from Olympic venues, with a high percentage of people looking to arrive and leave at around the same time, can hardly fail to make life easier long-term for a portion of the city's commuters.


The only exception to this rule of thumb would be if the main Olympic zones were on sites entirely divorced from the day-in-day-out life of the city.

Even if the Olympic related transport routes were not initially deemed optimal by city planners, there is a strong chance they would attract development, with the city, to an extent, reshaping itself to make best use of its new asset.

The Olympic Movement also brings to a Host City the perfect tool for blasting through the red tape and prevarication that often hold up urban developments for years on end: an immovable deadline.

So, whatever else happens, future Londoners will probably have cause to thank the Olympic Movement for improved public transport and for firing the starting-gun for redevelopment of what was, in the main, a fairly rundown area of back-street garages, scrap metal dealers and the like.

It is when it comes to determining what the development should consist of that any link between what the Olympic and Paralympic Movements think they need for a month-long global sporting spectacular and what the city requires to ameliorate the lives of its inhabitants over up to 50 years can be stretched to breaking-point.

Not on every detail, mark you; there is often enough common ground to make compromise possible.


Does East London need a new velodrome? Probably, as long as the British cycling boom doesn't puncture.

Does it need an Olympic-sized swim complex? Very much so - and while a building as swish as the Olympic Aquatics Centre was not strictly necessary, any Olympic park does require some sort of signature structure.

Does it need the sort of housing that an Olympic Village-style development can offer? Again, yes, although whether hefty price tags put Olympic Park accommodation beyond the reach of most local people remains to be seen.

Can it utilise an Olympic-sized media centre? Hmmm, one would hope so, but the jury is still out and one logical utiliser is on its way to Salford.

And the main stadium? That, as so often, is where the circle seems impossible to square.

In West European cities like London, football is the only sport likely to supply a viable week in, week out occupant of a stadium of anything like Olympic scale.


But football, in recent years, has become rich and spoilt.

Top clubs, by and large, want to play in stadiums designed for football, not multi-sports arenas.

And that means no athletics track.

If the commercial realities of life are now such that compromises over such an apparently trivial issue - trivial in the context of a stalled industrialised world economy and a Euro-zone crisis - are beyond the pale, then perhaps it is a mistake to try to use the Olympics primarily as an urban planning tool.

After all, though 21st century retail culture leaves me cold, I wouldn't mind betting that the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre ends up having a bigger influence on the future development of that part of London than any building erected specifically for the 2012 Games.

Perhaps "doing a Barcelona" is no longer possible.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed here.

Anyone who has seen the satirical television series 2012 must be beginning wonder whether it is in reality a documentary as  the subject of legacy stumbles from farce to fiasco taking in broken promises along the way...

In this week's episode we revisit one of the only two legacies actually  promised as part of our bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, that of the Stadium  (the other was an increase in participation in sport).

First, a recap. What was promised was a stadium which could be used by  the athletics community after the Games. It was recognised that the Olympic  Stadium would need a significant reduction in capacity in order to be suitable  for athletics needs and the plan was to remove the top-tier once the  Paralympics had finished leaving a Stadium with a capacity of 25,000. The  Stadium staying "as is" was never part of the promised legacy or of the plan.

Then enter West Ham United (supported by Newham Council with tax-payers money) and the plan changed. The legacy for athletics was forgotten (although obviously it wasn't sold to the public as such) and the new "legacy" became one of a football club running a multi-event stadium (with athletics  track) to which athletics would be lucky to stage five events a year and gain little or no grass-roots value from. But, we were told, because the track was  still there it was a legacy for athletics.

It was sold as "legacy" so well that the public loved it. So when Tottenham Hotspur entered stage left they were quickly painted as the ugly  sister. And yet, what Tottenham proposed was a reduced capacity (as in the  original plan) and a 25,000 capacity home for athletics (as in the original  legacy promise). But as the athletics legacy stadium would be at Crystal Palace (still in London last time I checked) and the track at Stratford would be  removed, no one liked the idea. Tottenham were intent on seeing fair play  though and court action loomed.


Also heading for the Courts were Barry Hearn and Leyton Orient who (rightly) pointed to football rules forbidding the re-siting of a larger club (West  Ham) on the door step of a smaller club (Orient). It looked a mess; it was a  mess and it was a mess wholly of the making of those charged with delivering  the supposed "legacy" (forget the ones that were promised, we'll never see them).

Meanwhile UK Athletics were so pleased with the whole set up that  they decided to keep their head office in Birmingham and support the  redevelopment of that city's Alexandra Stadium where their new offices will be sited. Publically they always supported the West Ham move because it preserved  the track – although they could never explain what use to the sport was a track  at a 60,000 seat venue which the sport could rarely access and never fill.

Then, all of a sudden they could - well, for one week in 2017 at least.  It was decided to bid for the IAAF World Championships which would require that  big stadium in Stratford. It should be remembered that UK Athletics had previously been  awarded the World Championships for 2005 before embarrassingly having to withdraw on the back of broken Government promises. The sport was given a £40  million "legacy" (they do like that word) payment by the Government (apparently  to stop them complaining) - £40 million which has produced a legacy which can  only be described as invisible at best. Certainly the grass-roots of the sport  have seen no benefit.

The IAAF received guarantees the track would remain and that Britain  would definitely not cause embarrassment by pulling out again. Minister for Sport and the Olympics, Hugh Robertson (pictured on right), went on television and promised the nation that the track would remain (probably to yawns all round).


Whoops Minister! It then emerged that both Tottenham (they whose plan actually delivers the promised legacy) and Orient had rather strong cases and embarrassment  was on the cards should they win the legal battle. So the same people who  promised one legacy (well, two actually) and then changed the plans decided  that they would change the plans again.

The Olympic Stadium was suddenly not going to be sold. It was going to  stay in public hands (you could hear the tax-payers cheer). It was going to  keep the track. It was going to stay at a 60,000 capacity. It was now going to  be leased to a football club (no one doubts a deal has already been done with  West Ham) for a rent equivalent to approximately 40 per cent of annual running costs  (more cheers from the tax-payer).

UK Athletics, who are staying in Birmingham, can now continue their bid for the  2017 Championships. They love it. Although how it services any athletics legacy  beyond that has yet to be made clear. West Ham probably love it too but can't  do so in public (yet).

Grass roots athletics can't see any benefit. Tottenham lose out big time despite being the only party apparently concerned about the nation's legacy promise  being delivered. And Orient.....well, it's not clear how this clears up their  issue. If (when) West Ham do move into Stratford, it could well be the death  knell for them....unless they fight it in court?

Oh yes, I forgot to mention; UK Athletics' only rival for the 2017 IAAF World Championships?  Qatar. The only nation ever to have actually delivered a legacy of increased  participation on the back of a major Games (2006 Doha Asian Games). I guess if  we lose we can always accuse them of corruption or has that already been done?

We await the next chapter with bated breath. It would make a great  storyline for a satirical television show only surely, no one would believe it?

As for legacy? As for clear strategy? As for promises?

Jim Cowan is a former athlete, coach, event organiser and sports development specialist who is the founder of Cowan Global, a company specialising in consultancy, events and education and training. For more details click here 

The look on Sebastian Coe's face as he glanced down at the silver medal around his neck after the 800 metres final of the 1980 Moscow Olympics was one of disgust rather than delight.

Bitter rival Steve Ovett had just acquired the gold, the only one that mattered as far as Coe was concerned. Finishing second in his prime event equated to failure. You sensed he might cheerfully have tossed his consolation prize into the nearest trash bin.

Hopefully that is a feeling that will not be shared by the young trio of British fighters who have just returned from the World Amateur Championships in Azerbaijan with silver medals of their own. For, make no mistake, these were no bits of boxing bling; this time next year I predict that at least one - or more - of them will be worth their weight in Olympic gold.

Britain's performance in Baku, where London super-heavyweight Anthony Joshua, Hull bantamweight Luke Campbell and Welsh flyweight Andrew Selby, the current European champion, all won silver, with Liverpool light-welter Tom Stalker adding bronze to a jingling collection , was more than outstanding. It was superb. In all, British boxers have qualified for 2012 in five weight divisions, with the strong likelihood of more to come in the final qualifying event next year.

This is a timely boost for the sport in this country, with head coach Rob McCracken skilfully building on the excellent foundations laid  by predecessor Terry Edwards up to and including Beijing.

Under Edwards GB have had boxers on the medal rostrum in three successive Olympics: Audley Harrison (gold) in Sydney, Amir Khan Khan (silver) in Athens and James DeGale (gold), and David Price and Tony Jeffries (both bronze) in Beijing. Plus Britain's only world amateur champion Frankie Gavin, in Turin four years ago.

McCracken still needs to go some way to emulate that that, but he is clearly doing a terrific job.

My belief is that boxing and taekwondo (aka the way of the fist and the foot) will be among the big British hits of 2012.

And the biggest hit of all could be Joshua (pictured in red vest), the super-heavyweight boxer who is now well on his way to be coming a superstar.


There is only one problem. Will he be able to resist the flood of offers from ear-bending promoters urging him to turn pro before the Games?

The retirement this week of David Haye, himself a fellow World Amateur Championship silver medallist, leaves a charisma chasm in the home heavyweight division. Joshua, at 21, 6ft7in, strikingly handsome in the Ali mould and with a pleasantly engaging personality, is a promoter's dream.

Just over a year ago, when he had been boxing for merely two years, and had won the ABA title in his 18th bout, he received an offer of £50,000 to go pro there and then.

You can bet he could get ten times that amount now- but gold in London would be worth a couple of million.

Therein lies Big Josh's dilemma. Olympic gold would set him up for life, but there is always a risk. He could get injured or beaten and that world championship silver would lose its market value. .

It was a risk the then 17-year-old Khan was not prepared to take, cashing in his medal in return for a seven-figure cheque from Frank Warren.

However I am assured Joshua is committed to staying on for the London Games. "I didn't take up the sport to earn money," he insists. "I did it to wins medals. The thought of boxing in the Olympics gives me beautiful feeling."

So, beauty ko's booty?  We must hope Joshua really can resist any temptation to exchange his vest and head-guard for a pot of real gold.

For I am convinced he has every chanced of taking winning the Olympic title after dethroning the reigning, albeit ageing, Olympic and double world Roberto Cammarelle, an Italian copper, and then, by just a single point (21-20), losing in the final to home-town favourite Magomedrasul Medzhisov (a name that truly must twisted the tongue of the MC).

Had this fight, one of the best-ever seen in the amateur super-heavyweight division, been in London 2012 and not Baku 2011 there's no doubt Joshua would have got the decision.

I am not suggesting the result was dodgy, despite those allegations, now under AIBA investigation, of shady deals involving Azerbaijan that preceded these Championships.

The verdict was a close and controversial as that between DeGale and former amateur rivals George Groves here six months ago. You could argue it either way.

However here is no doubt the cards were stacked against Joshua. It was the final bout of the Championships and the Azerbaijani President was the, sitting alongside AIBA boss Dr  C K Wu, with 800 militia and thousands of fans desperate to see the tournament conclude with a gold medal for the host nation

No surprise then, that Medzhidov got the nod as Mr President warmly shook the hand of Dr Wu.

Joshua was gutted of course, though to his credit accepted defeat gracefully. But a star was born.

So whom is this latest sporting sensation?


Joshua (pictured) is the British-bon son of Nigerian parents, brought up in Finchley, North West London, where he is coached at the local amateur club by the former British featherweight champion Sean Murphy.

As a kid he was a talented footballer and ran 11seconds for the 100 metres when he was 15.

It is this fleet-footedness which helps make him special, a more nimble, less robotic version of Frank Bruno.

In boxing terms he is still a baby, but in his 29 bouts he has shown the vital commodities that make a potentially great heavyweight: balls and a good chin. Plus a decent punch.

"He's a real athlete and a tremendous prospect," say McCracken.

For boxing, London 2012 may well be much more than the Anthony Joshua Games, but few youngsters have progressed as rapidly. His improvement since being stopped in the European Championships last June has been remarkable.

Even more remarkable as earlier this year there was a good chance he would not make the Olympics, or any further international appearances after being suspended by the ABA, having been charged with a drugs offence - not the performance enhancing variety but possession of an illegal recreational substance with intent to supply. He was in danger of being kicked off the GB squad for good.

Joshua always protested his innocence, claiming he was set-up, and  the case appears to have been quietly dropped, much to everyone's relief.

For while he may not have the chat and chutzpah of Haye, here is a genuine heavyweight with a smile that could make him one of the poster faces of 2012. .

He may still be learning the ropes inside of them and out, but Anthony Joshua now has the world at his fists.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire

For 16 years, the British Olympic Association (BOA) stood in glorious isolation alongside their bylaw which debars any Briton found guilty of a serious doping offence from taking part in any future Games.

In 2008, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), no less, stepped up alongside them with its own, smaller scale version of that sanction - in this case, debarring doping offenders from the upcoming Games following their offence.

Now that LaShawn Merritt, the United States Olympic 400 metres champion who returned from a two-year doping ban in July this year, has succeeded in convincing the Court of Arbitration (CAS) for Sport of the IOC rules demerits, earning the right to compete in the London 2012 Games in so doing, the BOA – not unnaturally – are feeling a little exposed.

Colin Moynihan, the BOA chairman, vowed today to do everything in his power to maintain the ruling. "In sport, there is nothing more important than to be clean," he said. "I think it is important that we send that message."

Despite recent criticism of the British position from the United States Olympic Committee, which supported Merritt in his CAS appeal, Moynihan insisted: "I don't believe our position is isolated."

He is clearly wrong in one sense. But in another, he is correct. Despite their disagreements last year over how surplus from London 2012 should be shared out, he has the unqualified support of Seb Coe, chairman of the London Games Organising Committee. He was also unequivocally backed today by the Minister for Sport and the Olympics, Hugh Robertson.

Interestingly, Andy Parkinson, the UK Anti-Doping chief executive, has declared his full support for the latest CAS ruling. "If you want lifetime bans – and that could be the right thing to do to protect clean athletes – let's do it via the World Anti-Doping Agency so that it applies to every country."

Spoken like a true administrator. But what likelihood is there, I wonder, of every country, or even many countries, embracing life bans through the appropriate political channel?

If they were that keen, surely they would already have acted independently, as the British have. After all, nobody's stopping them – are they?

At heart, this is not an adminstrative or political decision. It is a moral decision. And it is a complex moral decision.

Ed Moses, the great Olympic 400m hurdles champion who is now chairman of the Laureus World Sports Academy, was instrumental in creating the sport's first random out-of-competition drug testing programme.

Yet when Britain's Dwain Chambers sought to challenge his ban through the BOA bylaw on the eve of the Beijing Games – a challenge that failed – Moses was one of the relative view voices speaking up for the sprinter. He described a lifetime ban from the Olympics as being "like a death sentence."


In a competitive sense, he is right. And considering the justice of the position means facing a fundamental question – when someone has done wrong, at what point do you offer them the means of making up for it?

On the other side of the argument from Moses, however, you will find many, many athletes. And this is the strong basis on which Moynihan, Robertson, Coe et al hold fast to the bylaw.

Sitting next to Moynihan today was Sarah Winckless, the retired Olympic rowing bronze medallist and double world champion, who as chair of the BOA Athletes' Commission insisted that the bylaw had the support of 90 per cent of British athletes.

British athletes have now been surveyed on the matter after the last four Olympics, and there has been no wavering in their approval of the byelaw.That is a massively important, and massively valid, mandate.

And remember that the BOA bylaw was initiated by competitors, not administrators. Bryn Vaile, who was one of those competitors, remembers it well.

As a member of the formative BOA Athletes Commission, Vaile – a gold medallist in the 1988 Olympic Star sailing class – was among those responsible for getting the bylaw on the statute books on March 25 1992. Along with Olympic swimming gold medallist Adrian Moorhouse, he argued its case successfully to the BOA Executive Committee – and he believes passionately that the bylaw should remain.

Moorhouse, Vaile and fellow members of the Athletes Commission felt that action needed to be taken to prevent doping offenders returning to represent their country in the Olympics, and had to overcome some opposition from within the BOA before they had their way.

"We looked into the legal position of restraint of trade," Vaile recalled. "But the way we saw it, this was not preventing people carrying on their careers – they could still compete in grand prix meetings or World Championships."

Vaile, however, would like to see conditions become even more difficult for doping cheats. "I still believe that if you take performance-enhancing drugs, you should be banned for life," he said. "There should be no compromise to it, because that is compromising our futures. Every time a drugs cheat comes back to competition, it doesn't just tarnish the sport, and the people watching. It tarnishes the next generation, and it belittles every other clean athlete."

There was no doubt in Vaile's mind that Dwain Chambers did not deserve to return to the Olympic arena. And he will not be changing that view for LaShawn Merritt.

The BOA are stressing that there are important differences between their bylaw and the IOC ruling which has just been successfully overturned. One of the primary differences is the presence of an appeal process in the BOA version – a process which athletes such as 400m runner Christine Ohuruogu and former world triathlon champion Tim Don have been able to re-set their Olympic ambitions. In both cases, the fact that sanctions were applied for failing to be present for tests, rather than testing positive, was clearly important.

The BOA position has always been that it is not preventing athletes from competing – they are free to resume competition once they have served their bans - but it is simply not inviting them to its own party.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames. Rowbottom's Twitter feed can be accessed here. 

He's 6ft 6in, black, five times a world karate champion and there's no one you'd feel safer with walking the mean streets of Manchester's Moss Side.

You can't ignore Geoff Thompson, though oddly enough the powers-that-be in British sport continue to do so.

For almost two decades now Big Geoff has done more than anyone in Britain to make sport an antidote to the culture of guns and gangs in troubled areas such as Moss Side and Liverpool's Toxteth. There they call him "Mr Heineken" because he gets to the parts others cannot reach.

I have written here before about the one-time king of karate who runs the Manchester-based Youth Charter, a non-Government funded body which does admirable work in taking sport into communities which are often the exclusive domain of the underprivileged and unruly.

Those credentials are worth repeating because he has just come up with a scheme which, in my view, could go some distance towards alleviating the recent problems encountered when disaffected young people turned to violent disorder bordering on anarchy.

Thompson's Moss Side story began in 1993 when he started the Youth Charter following the gunning down in Manchester of a 14-year-old Afro-Caribbean kid. "I can accept losing medals but I cannot accept losing lives," he says. He has always believed sport is an intrinsic part of the rehabilitation process, helping to set up sports programmes in a dozen prisons and young offenders' institutions.

"The sad thing is that most do not have the option to get involved further in the sort of programmes that inspired them while they were inside. But at least sport gives them a chance. If you use its unifying power in the widest social and cultural sense you start to find some of the answers."

In the jails and on the streets they look up to him, affording him the respect he surely deserves from the top brass in sports administration. Successive Sports Ministers have promised they would find him worthwhile national role; none have materialised.

Why, we wonder?

Is it because he remains a bit of a maverick. a loose canon who speaks his mind and asks awkward questions? He certainly talks a lot but much of what he says makes immense sense.

The Youth Charter, like that other admirable institution which fell foul of the previous Government, the Panathlon, has been largely unheralded but its contribution to keeping kids off the street through sport has been immense.


Thompson (pictured), its founder and executive chairman, has seen what can be achieved in deprived areas and believes it can - and should - be extended to the rest of the country. But is anyone up there listening?

Apart from a brief spell on the board of Sport England some years ago, Thompson seems to be regularly overlooked when it come to top appointments .Yet he has obvious talents which could be employed advantageously, not least, I suggest, with 2012.

As a Londoner born and bred in the Olympic heartland of Hackney he is eminently suited to driving home the message of Olympic legacy among young sceptics.

Having watched the 53-year-old Thompson at work over the years it is evident he has more street cred than most other sports leaders put together. Which is why it is so odd that 2012 has not formally embraced him in its ever-expanding team.

Representatives of ethnic minorities are conspicuous by their absence at the top echelons of British sports administration Indeed, you would not require the fingers of one hand to count them.

So when someone as able and well-connected as Thompson comes up with a game plan which could not only help keep kids off the streets but infuse them with the ideals of Olympism surely it is worth earnest consideration.

Which is what Thompson's Youth Charter Legacy Manifesto aims to do, with a little help from us all.

One of its prime suggestions is that all sport and leisure communities facilities should be made available free of charge to those under-18 in the lead-up to during and after the 2012 Games.
An e-petition is to the Government being organised to this effect.

He says: "Anti-social behaviour, gang related activity, radicalised youth – all are problems being experienced in areas across the country impacting our social and economic well being nationally. With the present economic climate and huge rise in student fees one of our recommendations suggests that these facilities should be freely available to all young people. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) currently has a policy of free access to museums, but not sports, recreation and leisure facilities

"We need to reach young people in all communities, but particularly those most disaffected and disadvantaged. The legacy effort should not be an effort of competition, but of collaboration. We have lobbied and worked hard over a generation of legacy initiatives.

"We hope this Legacy Manifesto will be allowed to play an active part in contributing to the 2012 Games and their all important contribution to the wider social and cultural challenges that we are facing in our communities up and down the country, rural, suburban or urban."

What vexes Thompson – and he is by no means alone – is that so many kids in the Games Boroughs have said they do not feel that 2012 has any great interest for them. "They also felt that the Games had nothing in it for them. With no legacy effort communicated as part of the year countdown ceremonies, this is a major opportunity missed.

"Lord Sebastian Coe, recognised this fact, and stated that LOCOG needed to do more. Lord Coe also stated that these Olympics had the highest approval ratings of any modern-day Games to date.

"While this maybe true, and with ticket prices reflecting this fact, do the Games really engage , motivate and inspire the social and cultural pledges made in 2005?"

The manifesto represents the largest legacy consultation of all levels and aspects of communities and societies locally, nationally and internationally. "We have also consulted Mayor Johnson's office, as well as Lord Coe and members of LOCOG, Hugh Roberson, the Olympics Minister, David Chitterndale of the DCMS Select Committee, the BOA (British Olympic Association), Sport and Recreation Alliance, Sport England, the British Paralympic Association, even the Prime Minister. There have been indications of interest but so far the only positive response has come from the Paralympic people.

"We need a more collective approach to ensure that the 2012 Games are used to meet the ongoing social and cultural challenges that we face in our communities and the disaffected young people who live in them."

The "2012 Sport Legacy Access for All" e-petition seeks to have the social and cultural benefits of this debated with the aim of seeing a real and sustainable legacy of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games to all young people in the UK.  It also aims to provide a response to the current debate on lessons that can be learned following the large number of 'recreational rioters' who participated in this summer's disturbances.

"The '2012 Sport Legacy Access for All' is about giving young people somewhere to go, something to do and someone to show them." says Thompson.

The petition needs 100,000 signatures within the next three months for Government action to be considered. I urge you to sign up here.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire

The Olympics are coming. And, as with marriages and funerals, every fresh Olympics carries with it the memories of Olympics past.

The publication of Heat of the Moment (Wiley, £14.99), which is edited by The Sunday Times sports writer Andrew Longmore, celebrates the Olympic and Paralympic Movement by re-telling 25 "extraordinary stories" from the modern Games.

Each of these essays, by some of Britain's leading sportswriters, has at its centre an imperishable aspect of Olympic history; but each also provides context and detail which enrich the essential element.

Many sports followers will have a memory, for instance, of David Hemery's 400 metre hurdles win at the 1968 Mexico Games in a world record time of 48.12sec.

My own strong recollection is of watching the race on TV and then being obscurely irritated at the warmth of interest the winner generated in my mother, who was not generally a great sports enthusiast. I saw a Briton winning in a world record time, but as a child who two years earlier had watched England's footballers win the World Cup on that same television screen, I was still under the impression that this was what happened when Englishmen went out to play.

My mum, I can now fully appreciate, was responding in a womanly fashion to a tall, well-spoken, handsome Corinthian whose modesty in his post-race interview - manly chest still heaving, lock of blond hair drifting down his faintly sweated brow - was simply one more expression of his perfection. Then again, she was a bit the same way about John Newcombe, and he was an Australian...

But I digress.

In describing Hemery's marvellous moment, the Daily Mail's Neil Wilson starts by recalling the exact words used in the accompanying BBC commentary by David Coleman, words with which the deed are inextricably bound for all but the lucky few who witnessed the race at first hand:

"Hemery leads...it's Hemery, Great Britain. It's Hemery, Great Britain...And David Hemery's going to take the gold. David Hemery wins for Britain. In second place is Hennige. And who cares who's third? It doesn't matter...Hemery won that from start to finish. He killed the rest. He paralysed them."

And of course Coleman was soon apologising for his unwitting slight on Britain's other finalist, John Sherwood, who won the bronze...

Wilson describes Hemery's victory as "one of the greatest performances in an Olympic Games by a Briton."

But the apparent ease was deceptive, as Wilson also makes clear when he relates that our breezy Corinthian, who was based in the United States, had been slogging his guts out on the sand dunes of the Massachusetts coast, and had walked each of the eight lanes in the Estadio Olímpico on every evening for two weeks before the race, visualising himself winning from each position - and always in a world record.


There are many riches packed into this book. Britain's joyful hockey gold of 1988 is joyfully recalled by Barry Davies, another whose BBC commentary is forever linked with the recollections of a glorious victory. "Where are the Germans?" asked Davies, after Imran Sherwani had effectively settled matters with a breakaway third goal, before adding: "But frankly, who cares?"

Longmore offers a characteristically poised account of the climactic eight days of Tanni Grey-Thompson's Paralympic career in Athens 2004, during which she became the record-breaking holder of a tenth and eleventh gold in the 100 and 400m respectively. "She didn't do a lap of honour," Longmore writes. "She barely had enough strength left to push herself over the line."

Brendan Gallagher, of the Daily Telegraph, brilliantly evokes the fearsome endurance and technical precision which Britain's team pursuit cyclists demonstrated in their victory at the Beijing 2008 Games - "In smooth motion, the British team resembled a runaway train rattling down the track. Four carriages moving as one, linked by imaginary couplers. Lean together, move together, think together, win together...this train was on auto-pilot."

Not that this book is an exercise in British cheerleading. David Miller, with more than half a century of sport writing experience, ruminates interestingly on the claim of the Hungarian footballers who won gold at the 1952 Helsinki Games and went on to dominate the world game to be regarded as the greatest team ever. "This was not just the first flowering of a brilliant generation of players from an unknown, oppressed nation, but also the introduction of a new footballing ideology," Miller writes.

Tom Knight, the former Daily Telegraph writer who has covered eight Olympics, recalls the exact details of the Opening Ceremony that Nearly Went Wrong at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where Cathy Freeman - who was to deliver the gold all Australia craved eleven nights later - waited, freezing, for four minutes as a technical hitch threatened to halt the progress of the Olympic flame on its route to the cauldron.


Of all the stories, however, perhaps the one which resonates most truly with everything the Olympics aspires to mean is the recollection of the fellowship between Jesse Owens - featured on the front cover of the book - and the man whom he beat to the long jump gold at the 1936 Berlin Games, Luz Long.

Craig Lord presents a densely layered appreciation of how, despite the dark and foreboding influence on these Olympics and the presence in the stands of an impatiently expectant Fuhrer, Germany's model of an Aryan sportsman showed himself to be the model of a human as he made a point of advising and befriending an American opponent who was, according to the prevailing Nazi ideology, no more than a "black auxiliary".

Lord quotes in full the letter Long wrote in 1942, shortly before he died of his wounds during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. It makes clear, as well as any other words written, the transcendent possibilities that sport offers to mankind:

"My dear friend Jesse, my heart is telling me that this is perhaps the last letter I will ever write. If that's the case, I beg one thing of you: when the war is over, please go to Germany, find my son Kai and tell him about his father. Tell him about the times when war did not separate us and tell him that things can be different between men in this world. Your brother, Luz."

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames. Rowbottom's Twitter feed can be accessed here.