By Mike Rowbottom

The day after he has returned to France from the Sochi Winter Games, I ask Joël Bouzou - four times an Olympian in the modern pentathlon, and now President both of the World Olympians Association (WOA) and the global Peace and Sport initiative he founded in 2007 - what he would like the Olympics to look like in 30 years' time.

The response, as with all others from this idealistic and yet practical man, is considered and cogent.

"I would like to see the leaders of all the countries at the Opening Ceremony," he says. "I would like them to see the marching of the athletes all together.  I would like them to have the opportunity to visit the Olympic Village. I would like to have them watch some of the competitions to see what is the power of sport and how they can use it in their countries.

By Mike Rowbottom

Jürgen Gröbler has just made a strange noise. It's a bit muffled, as if someone has attempted to smother him. But there is pain there too. A definite touch of "aarghh!"

The man who has earned such golden success as British Rowing's head coach since 1992 is responding in his own slightly alarming way to an alternative London 2012 scenario - one where he had not taken the hard decision to switch his two top men from the pair to the four after three vain years of trying to beat the New Zealanders in a move that was designed to make a home gold for the men's team more of a banker.

History records that Gröbler's decision paid off. Andrew Triggs Hodge and Pete Reed, having had to give best to the omnipotent pairing of Eric Murray and Hamish Bond, returned to the boat in which they had won gold at the Beijing 2008 Olympics and helped defend that title for the home nation.

By David Owen

Size isn't everything - even in the Olympic world.

Arguably the best illustration of this came 20 years ago this month, when the Olympic cauldron was lit closer to the Arctic circle than ever before in a small Norwegian town of 22,000 people.

Over the next 16 days, little Lillehammer laid on one of the most atmospheric and efficient Olympic Games - Summer or Winter - of the modern era. Sports Illustrated called them "the fairy-tale Games...They could not exist. Reality cannot be this good."

By Mike Rowbottom

Unlike Jay Gatsby, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean have made a habit of successfully repeating the past, and will do so again as they mark the 30th anniversary of their ice dance gold medal performance at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics by reprising their famed "Bolero" routine in the Bosnia and Herzegovina capital.

The British pair will skate once more to the torrid, sinuous musical composition of Maurice Ravel's, to what Dean describes as "the rising beat that was taking us over", after accepting an invitation from the Mayors of Sarajevo and East Sarajevo.

They will thus return to the arena renamed as the Olympic Hall Juan Antonio Samaranch following the death of the former International Olympic Committee (IOC) President in 2010, but which was known back in 1984 as the Olympic Hall Zetra.

By Mike Rowbottom

How might David Wallechinsky have felt upon hearing that the Sochi Winter Games would contain 12 new events?

One could imagine the man who has written those two set texts of sporting reference - The Complete Book of the Olympics and The Complete Book of the Winter Olympics - giving a sigh of resignation as he learned of the latest obligatory addition to his ongoing magnum opus.

One could imagine him cursing the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for their ever-growing Topsy of a Games, with its never-ending expansions and alterations.

One of the wise heads of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently moved upstairs to honorary status on attaining the age of 80.

Kevan Gosper's autobiography, published just ahead of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, was titled An Olympic Life - and that is exactly what it has been for well over half a century, right back to 1956 when, at 22, he anchored the Australian men's 4x400 metres relay team to a silver medal at his previous home Games in Melbourne.

Gosper was elected an IOC member a few months after Jimmy Carter took over as United States President in 1977, the year of the Sex Pistols and the unprecedented third Grand National victory by Red Rum. He was an IOC vice-president from 1990-1994 and again from 1999-2003. He chaired the IOC's Press Commission for 25 years.

By David Owen

It is now nearly a decade since the London 2012 campaign revolutionised the art of producing films to support the candidacy of cities and countries competing to host sporting mega-events.

Two films from the campaign are seen as classics of the genre. Since the appearance of Sport at Heart, in which David Beckham famously wrestles with a crossword and a building-site worker, hi-viz jacket and all, pole-vaults into wet cement, no bid film seemingly has been bereft of humour. Meanwhile anyone who doubts the lingering influence of Inspiration, the film actually shown to International Olympic Committee (IOC) members on the day of the 2012 host-city vote in Singapore in July 2005, need only compare it to the basketball film used successfully by Tokyo last year, at the same critical juncture of the 2020 campaign.

Not surprisingly, Daryl Goodrich, the British filmmaker who teamed up with producer Caroline Rowland on both London 2012 masterpieces, has been much in demand in the Olympic Movement since then.

By Nick Butler

Just two years after the inaugural Asian multi-sports event in Manila, teams from Siam and Malaya were forced to abandon their journey to Shanghai for the 1915 Far Eastern Games such was the danger of submarine attack during the ongoing First World War.

China, Japan and the Philippines however chose to ignore this danger and compete anyway and a trend of using friendly competition to overcome adversity has defined Asian sport ever since.

Unrest, through the Second World War and trouble in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East today, has indeed choreographed an Asian century which has strived for harmony within this discord.

By Mike Rowbottom

Getting people running is an aspiration being pursued with increasing purpose all around the world as Governments seek to set their sometimes all-too-solid citizens on the path to fitness and health.

That aspiration is widely shared - both by the big federations and organisations which put on athletics events, and at grass roots - as we are witnessing in the growing phenomenon of ideas such as parkrun, which now has more than 760,000 registered runners across 10 countries.

When the Cardiff delegation heard the good news in Monte Carlo two months ago that their city was confirmed as host of the 2016 International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Half Marathon Championships, they acknowledged that one of the key factors was their intention to build upon the idea put forward by the host of this year's event, Copenhagen.

By Mike Rowbottom

At the Nagano 1998 Winter Olympics, Ivo Ferriani - then coach of the French bobsleigh team - made a bet with the driver of the four-man bob, Bruno Mingeon. If Mingeon managed to win a medal, he, Ferriani, would run through the snow by the course in his underwear.

Mingeon won bronze. Ferriani kept his promise.

Fourteen years later the Italian put himself on the line on another Olympic bobsleigh course - the Sanki Sliding Centre which will host the action at the imminent Sochi 2014 Winter Games.

By Gary Anderson

It may seem like a simple concept - the best ones usually are - but for the man at the helm of the worldwide university sports movement, the need for greater cooperation and a more synchronised approach to the staging and delivery of major international multi-sport events will be a key focus going forward as International University Sports Federation (FISU) President Claude-Louis Gallien and his extended "FISU Family" pack their bags in Trentino and look forward to Granada 2015 and beyond.

The theme of cooperation and compromise can perhaps sum up the staging of the 26th Winter Universiade here in Trentino too, as they were a Games patched up and stuck together like a last-minute Christmas present, due to the 18 months given to Trentino 2013 President Sergio Anesi and his colleagues, to ensure the winter sport extravaganza went ahead after the failings of original host Maribor.

By Mike Rowbottom

The next 25 years will witness all manner of change within the Paralympic Movement, but if Professor Hans Georg Näder has his way, one element at least will remain a constant - the commitment to the Movement of the company of which he is President and chief executive, Ottobock.

Formed in 1919, the company has offered a growing range of wheelchairs, prosthetics and associated products for people with limited mobility, and after a quarter of a century's association with the Paralympics, for which it was the first partner, Näder has pledged that the relationship will be maintained for the next 25 years at least.

"Since Ottobock's first involvement in the Paralympic Games in 1988, they have grown into one of the Paralympic Movement's most loyal, trusted and reliable partners. Their support has been instrumental to the growth of the Paralympic Movement," said Sir Philip Craven, the International Paralympic Committee's (IPC) President.

By Mike Rowbottom

As Vladimir Nabokov once wrote: "The more you love a thing, the stronger and stranger it becomes." The émigré Russian writer was very possibly not referring to marathon running when he gave voice to this perception - but it expresses the sense of complexity which this distance evokes among its serious protagonists.
Ethiopia's multiple Olympic and world champion Kenenisa Bekele is not yet among that number, although he plans to be by next Spring, when he will make his debut over 26 miles 385 yards.

Like the man who succeeded him as Olympic 5,000 and 10,000 metres champion in 2012, Britain's Mo Farah, the small but powerful Ethiopian is extending his ambition from the track to the road in a serious fashion next year, and although he is currently non-committal about where he will choose to make his first foray into the event, it is not impossible to believe that he will do so in London, where Farah - having teed himself up by running half the distance this year - will make his full marathon debut.

By Mike Rowbottom

Gymnastics is showcased once again in Glasgow this coming weekend (December 7) as World Cup competition returns to the city which is now vaulting to the top as a venue for the sport, with the 2014 Commonwealth Games, and the 2015 World Gymnastics Championships on its list of future engagements.

And there is a particular spring in the step of gymnastics internationally in the wake of this year's decision by the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) Executive Board that it would move up - along with aquatics - to join athletics in the top tier of sports when it comes to receiving television revenue money from the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.

Under the revised formula announced by the outgoing IOC President Jacques Rogge, the aquatics world governing body (FINA) and the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) joined their athletics counterpart, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), in Group A.

By Nick Butler

In recent years there has been a penchant for athlete administrators in sport, but in the case of Jean-Christophe Rolland he is merely following tradition in a rowing organisation that is oozing with ex-sportsmen.

First there was Thomas Keller, who served as President for 31 years until his death in 1989. Also an accomplished skier, Keller won a rowing bronze medal at the 1950 European Championships and only missed out on competing at the Melbourne 1956 Olympics because of the Swiss boycott protesting the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Then there was triple Olympian Denis Oswald, who won a bronze medal, also for Switzerland, at Mexico City in 1968.

It is he who Rolland has been elected to replace when Oswald steps down, after 24 years in charge, next July after an initial "transferral" period.