Phillips Idowu is standing at attention and levitating over a sandpit. The pale sand, and Idowu's trademark long white socks, glow; the rim of small windows around the huge hall in which he levitates, glow. Idowu's coach Aston Moore looks up at him, holding a long rake, which angles down between them.

If you were fanciful, you might almost think Moore has propelled his athlete into the air by pulling a giant lever.

This mysterious scene is one of the images assembled in a series of striking new photographic portraits of top athletes in training, alongside the people who, like Moore, have lifted them towards their Olympic and Paralympic ambitions.

The exhibition, which opened this week at the National Portrait Gallery, also includes pictures of those involved in the staging and projection of next year's Games.

The 37 portraits on show are by Emma Hardy and Finlay MacKay, the latest photographers to be commissioned for the Road to 2012 project as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

Road to 2012: Changing Pace is the second exhibition in a three-year cycle funded by BT that documents Britain's top athletes and key figures behind the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The contrast between the two photographers is marked. Hardy's studies of those who have helped deliver the Games, and those who will be involved with it in terms of contributing, organising or broadcasting, are apparently simple and informal, often catching them in outdoor settings.


Thus, we see Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London 2012 Organising Committee and the man whose dynamism and drive played a huge part in directing the Games to London, looking as if he is pausing for a moment during a run as he stands, hands on hips, halfway up a hill in a London park. The former double Olympic 1500 metre champion is still pin thin, although his face looks careworn and there are the first flecks of grey in his dark hair. The shapes of his arms, clad in a black training top, are complemented by the arms of a dark tree behind him.

The picture of Chris Allison, the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner who was appointed National Olympic Security coordinator in 2009, is similarly informal, as he stands in front of a table tennis table, clutching his hat in both hands and looking as if he is about to exit the building. But Allison is neatly framed by the rectangle of the white door behind him, and surrounded by others formed by the windows of the room he is in, and those of the table.

Why is this pleasing? I don't know. But it is.

Roger Mosey and Adrian Warner - respectively Director of London 2012 for Olympic host nation broadcaster, the BBC, and BBC London Olympics correspondent - are pictured by the Serpentine on a sunny April morning. Mosey, slightly in the background, toys with a water bottle; Warner, as if in presenter-mode, looks up to his right, hands clasped before him in a kind of reverse Prince Philip. Artless? No. "We were doing what we were told," Warner maintains.

MacKay's pictures of athletes and mentors, sometimes in the same frame, sometimes shot in slightly different versions of the same location, are like mysterious installations.


The Idowu picture, for instance. Presumably this is a standard drill - vertical jumping. But the image - and the lighting - turns what may be mundane into something mysterious.

MacKay's preposterous and exuberant study of the rising Taekwondo talent Aaron Cook has a similar effect. He is doing something, which, probably, he has done many thousands of times, namely launching a flying kick into a thick blue pad held by his brother Luke, who helps him with his training. But Cook is in a tracksuit, and the action is taking place just in front the garage door of his house in Manchester on a snowy day last December. As their boys lay on the action in their driveway, parents Christine and Nigel - who moved house from Dorset so that Aaron could train regularly at Manchester's GB Taekwondo Academy - stand watching them from their small front garden, another blue practice pad in between them.


It's like a scene from a dream. As is the image of the three women sailors currently leading the world in Match Racing - Lucy and Kate MacGregor and Annie Lush - as they stride in separate directions from the shallows at the Olympic sailing venue in Weymouth, while behind them their boat, bright white against a sky dark with impending rain, is hoisted up out of the water. An accompanying image shows their coach, Maurice Paadenkooper, standing in a launch beneath their suspended craft.

Another MacKay shot, taken at Bedford University, shows 2008 Paralympic swimming double gold medallist Eleanor Simmonds on her blocks, water dripping from her, ready to plunge back into the water as her coach, Billy Pye, a former miner, sits in the foreground, staring towards the other end of the pool.

"She might have qualified, she might have gone, but she wouldn't have achieved what she achieved in Beijing without Billy," are the accompanying words supplied by Val Simmonds, Eleanor's mother.

This exhibition couldn't be simpler to view. Walk in the doors of the NPG, do down the stairs, you're there. It's effect - less simple. But one thing it did as far as I was concerned was isolate some of the people and relationships involved in the vast, oncoming wave of the Olympics, and give them their own particular weight and value.

All these people have been, and are, working towards an end that will manifest itself a year from now. It is exciting.

The National Portrait Gallery/BT Road to 2012 Project
July 25 - September 25, 2011
Studio Gallery and Ondaatje Wing Main Hall, National Portrait Gallery, London,
Admission Free
www.npg.org.uk/roadto2012

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.

It has been a week for looking forward for all who savour the Summer Olympics, exactly a year to go with London well ahead of the Games. Ok, so the Trafalgar Square celebrations may have had faint echoes of the hilarious "mocumentary" TwentyTwelve now being repeated on BBC2, but the sight of Boris Johnson making that old sobersides Jacques Rogge's shoulders heave with laughter was a delight to behold.

Suggesting London is so ready it should call a snap Olympics was a gem. Just like Boris.

If perchance Bojo isn't re-elected next May I suggest they make him Honorary Mayor for the opening ceremony. He might make even Princess Anne crack a smile.

When she lifted the lid of the box containing the new Olympic medals you might have thought she was opening a tin of smelly dog food for the royal corgis.

More seriously, while we relish the events to come next July for the summer Olympians, we find ourselves looking back in anguish on what has happened following one iof Britain's greatest-ever Olympic triumphs over a quarter of a century ago in the Winter Games.

The perfection of T&D - Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean – may to some still seem a load of old Bolero but it engrossed the nation with one of the biggest-ever TV audiences for a sports event.

Previously the balletic brilliance of John Curry and the sequinned skills of Robin Cousins had seen Britain revel in a golden decade on ice.

Alas, subsequently the sport has been skating on precariously thin ice and now it seems it has finally fallen through it.

If confirmation of this was needed it came with the news that the elite skating academy at Nottingham's National Ice Centre, where T&D (whose coach and mentor Betty Callaway died recently) first began their quickstep to stardom, is to stop exclusive coaching of ice dancers from September due to cost and a lack of top class coaches.

Some of the ten young people aged eight to 15 in the ice dance section of the NIC Skating Academy have received specialist coaching for ten years. But according to director Geoff Huckstep: "We can no longer afford to keep ice dance in the academy."

He told the Nottingham Post: "The City Council has to fund any operating deficit the National Ice Centre has. Last year the deficit was £160,000. The Council says we have to get to an operating deficit of no more than £50,000 this year. They have massive financial pressures and we just have to take our share.

"Two years ago we had 25 ice dance skaters including three couples. We now have no couples and only ten solo ice dance skaters."

While specialist coaching of figure skaters will continue surely this signals the last waltz for ice dancing in Britain.

Especially as the couple who had been groomed as heirs top the T&D mantle - the Scottish brother and sister act John and Sinead Kerr, both now in their thirties, have decided to call it a day competitively after having to withdraw after this year's European championships because of Sinead's continuing shoulder problems.

The Kerrs did not compete in the last British Championships in November either due to her injury although they did earn a second bronze in this year's Euros.

At the World Championships in Moscow this April, in the absence of the Kerrs, the highest British place was the Olympic ice dancers, Penny Coomes and Nick Buckland.

They had had to pull out of the British Championship when Penny fell on her knee in the opening round. That left Louise Walden and Owen Edwards to take the vacant title. There were no other competitors in that British Ice Dance Championship - so much for the legacy of T&D.


In the World Championships in April Penny and Nick finished 16th and Louise and Owen 20th. It was their debut performance in worlds for both couples, although Penny and Nick did compete in the Olympics.

The other skating disciplines reveal a similar sorry tale, with no other Briton anywhere the top ten.

In the this year's ladies' World Championship, an injured Jenna McCorkell, seven-times British champion. finished 24th, which was last in the final round.

In the pairs event, British champions Stacey Kemp and David King, just failed to reach the top 16 and the new British men's champion, 23-year-old David Richardson, did not advance out of the preliminary rounds of either the world or European championships.

Now should you think I have suddenly become an expert on Britain's frozen assets I should explain that I am indebted for this chilling background information to one who is.

Sandra Stevenson is one of the world's premier skating authorities, who has covered the sport for the Guardian, Telegraph, Observer and Independent, also writing T&D's biography. Currenty she is skating correspondent for magazines iSkate (GB) and Blades on Ice (USA), having covered every Olympic Games and World Championships since 1968.

So she knows what she is talking about when she says that British skating has never been in a worse position, and  hopes for the immediate future at international level are non-existent.

"As in all sports, the technical accomplishments  of the top international contenders continually increase. In skating this has taken an enormous toll on the likelihood of injury," Stevenson told me.

"Unfortunately, to get to a higher and higher state, athletes must devote more time and energy to the sport. In skating, both on the international and national fronts, to cut down on expenses, the international and domestic controlling bodies of the sport have limited the number of entrants to championships by requiring high point totals to be set in lesser events. These totals are very high and competitors must spend a lot of money of their own to get to designated minor events abroad hoping to post the required points.

"The British Ice Dance Championship this season had only three couples entered with only one finishing. The women's Championship also had only three entrants, the smallest field ever.

"The situation is unlikely to change. Ambitious parents would be well advised to put their children into less costly sports."

It is surely also a factor that while T&D continue to popularise the entertainment aspect of skating with the highly successful TV show 'Dancing on Ice' the sport suffers because of a lack of modern-day role models.

What it needs is another inspirational figure..

Here's a thought. When Mayor Johnson hilariously waxed on about "whiff-whaff" in  Beijing he sparkled a whole new surge of interest in table tennis.

Apparently it has become a niche sport, now being played by thousands in clubs, pubs and sports centres throughout the land. Even the chavs love it. Ping pong is the new snooker.

So come on Boris. It's up to you. Off your bike and get your skates on.

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 thing about swimming, I find, is that it takes you into your own little world, where you become aware only of the repetitive requirements for forward motion. It's a sport where, more than any other I know of, there is the possibility of daydreaming.

But as I surfaced at one point in my swim today, any lulled senses were swiftly sharpened by the vision of Lord Sebastian Coe walking past, suited and booted, no more than 10 metres away.

"Verily," I thought, "this be not the Grange Paddocks pool in Bishop's Stortford, wherein ladies of a certain age are wont to proceed in conversation, and without dampening their hairstyles. Yea, I am in lane four of the London 2012 Olympic pool."


The only qualifications required for such a privilege on the day the Aquatics Centre officially opened - by coincidence, a year exactly before the London 2012 Olympics are due to get underway - were to be a member of the media, and ideally, capable of swimming a length of the 50 metre pool without getting into undue distress.

To be honest - and why not? - swimming 50m straight off feels a bit of a stretch. I have never swum so far in a straight line. But then I live in England, where, to be honest - and why not? - there are relatively few opportunities to practise such an accomplishment.

I believe I am right in saying that the London Aquatics Centre, built for £269 million by Balfour Beatty to a design by the internationally acclaimed, Baghdad-born architect Zaha Hadid, is only the sixth official Olympic-sized pool in Britain.

There's probably more than that number in Brisbane alone.


But if the Aussies have more pools than us, they certainly don't have a pool like this one. OK. The swooping vision of the original Hadid roof has been blinkered. Rather than being more than 3000m², it was reduced to a mere 1000m². Meanwhile, costs rose by the same ratio - the figure of £242 million was around three times the original budget projection, and the numbers continued to spin until they reached £269 million. So perhaps that original design might have been a flourish too far. And perhaps Hadid could solace herself with the fact that, unlike her grand designs for the Cardiff Bay Opera House or the Peak Club in Hong Kong, this one actually got built. And in double-quick time.

Coe, who had earlier escorted the International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge around this watery wonder, firmly defended the decision to clip the wings of the visionary roof.

"I don't think this was the time or the place or the environment for vanity building," he said to the relatively small gathering of British media folk who were preparing to immerse themselves. "They do their task.

"We made a judgement at Games time, yep, ok, they are not probably going to be the prettiest things on the side of what is a beautiful pool. But we have been consistent with what we have said, whether the economy was at the high water mark or bumping along the ground we were going to deliver sustainably and responsibly."


The roof may be straighter laced than envisaged, but the ceiling of the pool itself is positively voluptuous, with dazzling spotlights studded into it like so much body jewellery.

While backstroking, it is quite something to contemplate, along with the steeply banked seats, broadly marked in white and yellow by a giant section of the Olympic logo, which rise at either side.

There had been speculation that the top seats on one side would have their view of the pool marred by the belly of the roof. Not so, according to a series of pictures shown to me after my little dip by the venue operations manager, Gregg Holland, which make it clear that all of the pool, and a bit of the opposite stand, is visible - even if there are shades of the Birmingham City press box about the view.

One thing that our future Olympians won't have to worry about, I can happily report - no horrid shock when they dive in. The water is pleasantly warm.

I confess, it is something I wondered about.

Shortly before the end wall the central line of dark blue tiles comes to a T-junction, beyond which will be the heart-stopping blank of the final stroke. There are swimmers now competing in Shanghai or training elsewhere who, a year from now, will be right here in this spot feeling gigantic emotions of joy and disappointment.

And as they look up from this spot at the steep tiers of seating either side of them, the noise in this enclosed arena will reverberate with excitement.


For Coe, the experience of this new sporting arena was clearly intense. Asked to look forward to the way he will be feeling when London 2012 finally gets underway, he responded: "If it's anything like what I feel today then it will be exceptional."

He added that Rogge had been "taken aback" by what he had seen, although he did not relay the words the IOC president had used. Given that Coe found the president's input "reassuring", we must assume he was pleasantly surprised.

In fact, I can corroborate that. As Rogge left the poolside, having watched a demonstration of synchronised swimming that was excellently performed but appeared to have fallen victim to a technical hitch in the sound system - unless this was a deliberate protest against yet another public airing of Queen's We Will Rock You - where was I, oh yes, as Rogge left the poolside, a surge of TV reporters made their way over to him as if their microphones were being dragged by some ineradicable force, and one of the number shouted out the urgent question: "Are you happy with what you have seen here?"

"Absolutely," replied Rogge, before moving smartly on.

As I had caught the unexpected sight of Coe while hanging on to one end of the pool - there's a little raised ledge all the way along at a convenient height, if you want to know - a colleague in the next lane asked the noble Lord if he was going to join us.

"I've got the best excuse in the world," Coe replied. "I can't swim."

You can't argue with that. But he was missing something.

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.

In just one year's time the eyes of the world will turn to the UK as the greatest show on earth arrives in town.

London is the only city in the world to have hosted the Olympic Games three times and Britain invented or codified eight of the world's ten biggest sports. But it isn't just about our sporting success. When it comes to business achievement, we don't have to wait until next year to celebrate.

Today marks the completion of all the main Olympic and Paralympic venues - a full year ahead of schedule. Not only are they well ahead of time, they are also on budget. Alongside this are massive improvements to the transport infrastructure, also largely complete. And in September the private sector will complete Stratford City, Europe's largest shopping centre.

Cynics said that the whole programme was bound to overrun. They doubted the Government's ability to manage the process. They questioned whether UK construction firms were up to the job.

They pointed to delays and overruns on the Dome, the Channel Tunnel and the Scottish Parliament.

Over the last five years, some 40,000 workers and more than 1,500 businesses - along with a stellar line-up of some of this country's finest architects, designers and engineers - have delivered their answer.

To have completed Europe's largest construction project on time and on budget is an extraordinary achievement. The Olympic Park will now become a global showcase for the capabilities of the UK construction industry and an extraordinary advertisement for Britain's ability to deliver.

All of this happened in an area that was the dumping ground for London's waste for over a century. The soil in the Olympic Park area was contaminated with tar, coal, lead and arsenic and two million tonnes of it had to be recycled in the largest clear-up operation ever seen in the UK.

This was followed by a radical overhaul of local infrastructure including dismantling a landscape of electricity pylons and re-modelling power and water systems by creating miles of new tunnels to bury pipes and wirings.

Then the site received an extraordinary ecological makeover, with eight kilometres of new waterway, 4,000 trees and half-a-million new plants helping to shape the biggest urban park created for London since the Victorian age. From the start this project has aimed to set new standards in environmental sustainability as well as commercial viability.


And that's before we get to the venues themselves. Last week the stunning new velodrome was named on the shortlist for the 2011 Stirling Prize for architectural excellence. It is the lightest and fastest velodrome ever built and, alongside the Aquatics Centre, is likely to be one of the most visually striking legacies of the project.

Indeed, right from the start all the Olympic infrastructure was designed with legacy as well as 2012 use in mind. As the Closing Ceremony of the Paralympics concludes next year's celebrations, a brand new quarter for the capital will be opened with new housing, schools, medical facilities, park, business units - and of course the best sporting facilities in the country.

London 2012 is on track. We want our athletes to get as many gold medals as possible. But the real gold medal for the country will be the extraordinary regeneration in East London and what it says about Britain's ability to delivery world-class projects on time, on budget and to the highest possible standards.

Jeremy Hunt is the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport

As we approach one year to go to the London 2012 Olympic Games, it is fair to say that things have gone unbelievably well for the event.

There have certainly been a couple of hiccups - most notably the criticism that surrounded the sale of Olympic tickets not too long ago - but as London 2012 chairman Sebastian Coe accurately explains: "There is no system you can put in place given that scope and that scale that is ever going to be perfect."

And despite the ticket "fiasco", the issue would barely have got a mention if it had happened in the chaotic build up to the Athens 2004 Olympics or more recently the Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games, where a major bridge collapsed outside the main stadium in the Indian capital just days before the start of the event felt like a run-of-the-mill occurrence for those of us in the media that were stationed there for the competition.

However, one subject is starting to crop up on a far more continual basis and it is an issue that looks rather more difficult for the London 2012 Organisers - and perhaps more relevantly the head coaches for the 26 Olympic and 20 Paralympic sports at the Games - to control.

It is the issue of social media - and more specifically Twitter.


It all started earlier this month when the British Olympic Association (BOA) launched a grand unveiling of their London 2012 Team GB House, which is located at the rather impressive Westfield Stratford City that overlooks the Olympic Park.

All the BOA big hitters were out, with chairman Colin Moynihan and chief executive Andy Hunt making the keynote speeches, but perhaps the most noteworthy discussion of the day came when Sir Clive Woodward, the director of sport for the BOA, revealed the code of conduct that has been drawn up for Team GB athletes at the Games.

Undoubtedly, the credentials of Sir Clive as a winner in elite sport are difficult to question and so respected is he in the world of rugby, after he steered England to World Cup glory as head coach in 2003, that his mere presence from afar has caused a complete tsunami at the Rugby Football Union (RFU) due to the fact he did not take up the role of Performance Director at the organisation earlier this year.

However, it was interesting to see at the BOA event that even the master disciplinarian seemed to admit he has no control over what the British athletes write on Twitter.

"One of my favourite lines is how do you want to be remembered?" Woodward said.

"I think there could be nothing worse, if it was me, and someone said because of what I did on Twitter cost them a medal or caused all this aggravation in this event which we are all incredibly proud to be involved in."

Fair point, but a plea to athletes rather than an order?

The problem is Twitter bans are difficult to impose. It comes down to freedom of speech, recognised as a human right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So while coaches might like to ban athletes from Twitter, it seems they are not able to.

One head coach who I am sure would love to ban the forum is UK Athletics head coach Charles van Commenee.

I sat less than a few metres away from the Dutchman at a lunch oganised by the Sports Journalists' Association (SJA) earlier this month when he said: "I don't think sanctions [on Twitter] are feasible or will prevent incidents from happening."

Van Commenee was responding to a question regarding his high profile row with triple jump world champion and London 2012 gold medal prospect Phillips Idowu.

Van Commenee was upset that Idowu withdrew from the European Team Championships on Twitter but claimed: "We have both decided to leave the incident behind us."


Not according to Idowu.

In a radio interview on BBC Radio 5 live, the 32-year-old claimed: "I don't want anything to do with [Van Commenee].

"He embarrassed me on TV, so he should apologise.

"I haven't spoken to Charles since that incident and I have said that I won't speak to him until he publicly apologises.

"Until then I don't want anything to do with him.

"I'm moving on and focusing on the job at hand which is to compete.

"I won't stop tweeting.

"I'm being myself, winning events and having fun.

"It's a way for me to engage directly with my fans without having my words twisted."

Not what van Commenee would have wanted to hear.

For the sake of British athletics, this must be sorted out - according to British triple jump legend and world record holder Jonathan Edward - but the fact of the matter is that this will not be the last time we see a high profile Twitter row in the build up to London 2012.

Sandwiched in between the BOA event and van Commenee SJA lunch, I attended The Sports Leisure and Marketing Conference "Examining the global impact of the Olympics" which took place at Northampton University.

The keynote speech came from Professor Andy Miah from the University of the West of Scotland.

Miah described London 2012 as the "Twitter Olympics" and stated that it is no longer a case of "if you are computer literate or not, but how computer literate you are".

He outlined that Twitter is just one social networking communication source open to us and that even if there are bans on its use, there are ways around them.

A clear example of this came at the World Aquatics Championships where athletes faced with China's bans on Twitter and Facebook opened accounts with local equivalents, boosting their profile in the country.

British teenage diving star Tom Daley led the trend after he began posting updates and pictures on Tencent, one of the leaders in China's fast-growing microblogging sector.


A Tencent staff member said Daley attracted 10,000 followers in one day after he opened the account earlier this year.

He now has around 343,000 followers - more than triple the number he has on Twitter.

Communication departments have been tasked with attempting to handle social media at London 2012 but it is becoming increasingly difficult to see what they can really do to anybody posting anything they like.

So perhaps we have now identified the one uncontrollable element of London 2012 as you simply can't stop people writing what they feel and even the great "super injunction" doesn't seem to be able to halt the unstoppable Twitter.

And if you don't believe me, just ask Ryan Giggs.

Tom Degun is a reporter for insidethegames. To follow him on Twitter click here. 

Norway is an extraordinarily important country for the Olympic Movement.

Its athletes have won more Winter Olympic medals (303) – and more Winter Olympic golds (107) – than those from any other single country.

For a small nation of about five million people, that is a staggering statistic.

The shockingly lethal attacks that have killed more than 90 in Oslo and Utoeya will hit the Olympic Movement hard – and not just because of the spotlight it throws on the importance of security a year ahead of London 2012.

When I spoke to Gerhard Heiberg, a longstanding International Olympic Committee (IOC) member from Norway, on Saturday afternoon, I was not surprised to learn that IOC President Jacques Rogge had already been in touch.

"I think he was almost the first one calling me," Heiberg – who had taken Rogge's call in New York on his way back to Norway – told me.

"He said how sorry he was and asked whether any members of the Olympic family had been affected."

Back in his home country now, Heiberg reports that there is "a feeling of togetherness".

"This happened to Norway and Norwegians," he went on.

"This is the biggest disaster since the Second World War.

"People feel that we are one family.

"The sorrow is there among all of us."

While sorrow, incomprehension and no doubt anger will be the prevailing emotions for some time to come, the Olympic Movement has the opportunity to play an important part in the healing process.

The second Winter Youth Olympic Games look set to be held in Norway in four-and-a-half years' time at Lillehammer, the small town that played host to the Winter Games proper in 1994.

This is not yet official.

According to Heiberg, the ball is in the Norwegian Government's court, with a decision on whether "a certain sum" can be guaranteed expected to be taken by the Norwegian Parliament in September or October.

But to my knowledge, with the inaugural Winter Youth Olympics set to take place in Innsbruck early next year, no other candidate is on the horizon.

And Heiberg confirms both that Lillehammer want the Games and that the IOC have said they would like to stage them there.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg rose admirably to the bleak occasion when he said that no one "is ever going to frighten us away from being Norway" and urged Norwegians to show that "the answer to violence is even more democracy, even more humanity".

In exactly this spirit, Lillehammer 2016 could play a big part in helping to ensure that the victims of this week's ghastly attacks, so many of them young, are remembered in a dignified and life-affirming way.

Let us hope that decision-makers inside and outside the Olympic Movement can do what is necessary to enable this to happen.

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 by clicking here. 

For the moment, intermittent rain had given way to sunshine at the Redgrave and Pinsent Rowing Lake, and the entire GB Rowing Team for this year's World Championships in Bled, Slovenia. were assembled at their HQ at Caversham, near Reading, for the benefit of the cameras.

The atmosphere was that of a school photograph, with the big lads at the back creating most of the noise. Alan Campbell, the single sculler from Coleraine who spends no small part of his training time heaving giant tyres around, was leaning over the flaxen-haired figure of Andy Triggs Hodge, one of the golden four from the Beijing Olympics, enquiring loudly and repeatedly: "Whose is this Labrador?"

Eddies of laughter swirled up from different parts of the group. There were roars of derision as one of the taller rowers was asked to depart the front rank and join the tall boys at the back. There were whistles as a lady photographer sprawled on the ground attempting a notably challenging shot, and again, as a banner promoting Reactivate Bucks, installed by a media member chancing their arm, was good humouredly but swiftly uninstalled by Caroline Searle, the GB Rowing press officer.


As the World Championships loom on the horizon, GB Rowing appear a happy crew - and a successful crew, as their recent performances at the World Cup in Lucerne (four golds, four silvers and two bronzes) and at the last adaptive rowing World Cup racing in Munich (two golds and two bronzes from four boats) clearly indicate.

There is serious work to be done in Slovenia, however. Not least the paramount task of qualifying crews for next year's London Olympics.

As in other sports such as modern pentathlon, the emphasis is on securing places, not people. If, for instance, the men's eight do well enough to earn a place at London 2012 it doesn't mean that the eight who have secured that qualification will personally be assured of involvement a year down the line. Oh no.


With promising young oarsman such as 19-year-old Constantine Louloudis and his 22-year-old partner in the pairs, George Nash, pushing hard into the senior ranks - they came fourth in this year's National Trials - the selection could yet be an altered one as London 2012 approaches. For the men's heavyweight rowers, Bled will offer an opportunity to excel - but also a challenge to show they can keep their performances up to the mark. The mark monitored by the man who has been the men's Chief Coach since 1991, since when he has personally coached five crews to gold at the last five Olympics.

Over the years, this native of Magdeburg has made some big calls when it comes to selection - and he has yet to have been proved wrong. Steve Redgrave and Matt Pinsent probably decided for themselves that they didn't want to continue as a pair after winning successive Olympic titles in Barcelona and Atlanta - where Redgrave suggested that anyone seeing him rowing competitively again would have full permission to shoot him. But it was Jürgen Gröbler who managed their switch to the four which caught the public imagination as no other rowing crew had in winning gold at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

The boat in which that iconic - yes, I think that word really might be merited a sporting context - victory was obtained now stands on display in Henley's River and Rowing Museum. A sporting icon, in fact, although sadly the sugar lumps which Redgrave - by then diabetic - had taped to the inside of the shell in case of any unforeseen delays no longer remain.


Three years after that Sydney triumph, the coxless pair of Pinsent and James Cracknell, good enough to have won the world title in the two previous years, dropped off the podium standard to fourth place. Again, Gröbler was at the centre of a decision to shift the two Olympic gold medallists back into a four in time for the Athens Games of 2004. Result, with the able assistance of Steve Williams and Ed Coode, gold.

The situation at these World Championships is different to previous ones, in that, as Performance Director David Tanner asserted earlier this week at the GB press conference, this team has a greater breadth of quality - across men's and women's heavyweights, lightweights and adaptive crews - than any previous one.

In Gröbler's domain, there is certainly huge consistency. The four of Alex Gregory, Ric Egington, Matt Langridge and Beijing gold medallist Tom James were Lucerne gold medallists, the eight took bronze behind the German world champions and the Netherlands, and the pair of Triggs Hodge and Peter Reed were silver medallists behind the all-conquering New Zealanders Eric Murray and Hamish Bond.

Should those crews maintain their relative positions in Bled, where Alan Campbell, in the single sculls, and the quadruple scull - which also took silver in Lucerne - it would be a very big call to make any alterations going into Olympic year.

And yet if Triggs Hodge and Reed, who finished seven seconds adrift of the Kiwis in Switzerland, should suffer another heavy defeat, there may be a question of whether these two gold medallists of 2008 will continue to bash their heads against the black wall for another year.

Should Gröbler be contemplating the possibility of another move to parallel that of 2003 he knows that the only justification for such a switch would be gold rather than silver. But then rowers of the pair's quality could surely add an extra surge to any boat.

Gröbler was, as you might imagine, careful not to disclose any of his tactical considerations to the media throng this week. What he did say on the subject of the London 2012 Games, in characteristically gnomic style, was this: "Under nobody's seat is there a name."

In other words, it's all up for grabs. And performance is king.

There is only one road leading to the Redgrave and Pinsent Rowing Lake - it is called Gröbler Way. Entirely fitting.

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.

Next week marks a year to the start of London 2012, and at UK Sport we will be inviting the British media to view our Mission 2012 tracker boards to see what sort of shape British Olympic and Paralympic sport is in.

The boards, which cover the largest walls in our office, tell a compelling story of the work done over the last four years to ensure British athletes are best prepared for the extraordinary opportunity they will face in 12 months' time.

If I am honest Mission 2012 is starting to feel a slightly inaccurate name for the process UK Sport has developed to drive and monitor the development of the high performance system in this country. It may sound clichéd, but in our minds London definitely represents a milestone (albeit a unique and hugely important one) rather than the ultimate end point of this incredible journey. Indeed, much of our current work now is about ensuring we can maintain the success we are confident will be achieved in 2012; Project Rio is already a daily reality for me, and the Project Sochi tracker board is starting to fill up.

It was a pleasure to speak at the launch of Team GB House last Tuesday. I was happy to reiterate our goal of top four in the Olympic medal table and second in the Paralympic medal table, based on the quality of our dialogue with sports through Mission 2012. Our equally important goal of winning more medals across more sports than in Beijing also remains on track.

It's important to state Mission 2012 was also designed to enable UK Sport to capture examples of excellence and share these as best practice, as well as to allow us to target additional support to sports who identify challenges they need help with. This brings our specialist support teams into close contact with athletes, coaches and Performance Directors and thus adds to the level of insight we have into the collective performance potential of both Team GB and Paralympics GB.

So how does Mission 2012 actually work? Sports reflect on their World Class Performance Programme at three key stages of the year – pre-season, mid-season, and at the the post-season review.

We ask them to report against what we term the three  dimensions of success: their Athletes (how they are developing and performing), their System (pathways, processes, infrastructure, support services) and the Climate (the mood in the camp). These dimensions then break down into a total of 30  discrete elements, which helps sport drill down into to the components which may hold the key to performance breakthroughs.

Our team of Performance Advisers, who have a portfolio of sports that they work with on a day to day basis, work through this process with each sport's Performance Director in order to support their submission, but also to 'challenge' the sport and provide a different perspective.

The submissions are then reviewed by the Mission Panel, a group of high performance experts with a wealth of knowledge and experience, who help us to identify common themes and formulate solutions where sports have identified challenges they need help with. Sports often come to present to the Panel themselves if they are experiencing challenges, or have best practice to share.

To put this in perspective the latest round of submissions identified 31 new 'need helps' from 22 different sports, to which our performance team are now reacting and providing appropriate solutions to individual issues, or matching a sport that 'needs help' with one that excels in that particular area, in order to share expertise.

To some Mission 2012 might appear just a set of traffic light ratings on a tracker board, but I believe it has brought about more openness and honesty within the high performance system and has reduced the chances of emerging challenges becoming real problems. It is also building a data bank of insights and lessons learned that will continue to inform our high performance system for many years to come, not least on the roads to Sochi 2014, and Rio 2016.

Peter Keen is Director of Performance at UK Sport and will be discussing the latest results of the Mission 2012 process alongside UK Sport chief executive Liz Nicholl, David Faulkner of GB Hockey and Lorraine Brown of British Handball on Monday at UK Sport HQ in Russell Square

FIFA is facing its own News International moment with its corruption scandal. News International thought that by saying phone hacking was the work of one rogue reporter, Clive Goodman, the royal correspondent, and his confidant Glenn Mulcaire, it could isolate the problem. As the world now knows, it could not.

FIFA is in danger of making a similar mistake if it thinks the corruption scandal has been dealt with once the Ethics Committee finishes its work on July 23. Let us consider what is in store for this day.

On that day, we shall know the fate of Mohammed Bin Hammam for his alleged attempt, in May, to bribe members of the Caribbean Football Union in Trinidad during his aborted FIFA presidential campaign. It is alleged that bribes of $40,000 (£24,000) were paid or offered to each member. Caribbean Football Union officials Debbie Minguell and Jason Sylvester, who were suspended along with then FIFA vice-president, Jack Warner, will also hear their fate.

If the leaks that have emerged from the Ethics Committee are any guide, the case against the accused, particularly the Qatari, looks a formidable one. All three must, for now, be considered innocent. They may, or may not, be found guilty, and they may, or may not, appeal against an adverse decision. However, all the signs are that FIFA will present the report to the world, and then claim it has investigated the only piece of hard evidence it had on corruption. So as far as FIFA is concerned, it will have done its job and the work will now be over.


FIFA will be gravely mistaken if it takes that view. The world outside will not think that. If FIFA believes that what the world thinks does not matter, all that matters is the FIFA family, to use Sepp Blatter's favourite phrase, then it would do well to study what has happened to News International. That fostered the idea that what mattered was the Murdoch family and that attitude has resulted in the very future of the family, certainly as a media player in the UK, coming under scrutiny.

The problem for FIFA is that, like the Murdoch empire, it has lost credibility and it cannot regain it with one Ethics Committee report. It needs to go much wider and, above all, it needs to show humility and acknowledge that it is not as powerful and mighty as it sometimes pretends to be. Hubris, as the Murdoch story shows, comes before a fall and FIFA has also been guilty of that.

So consider how FIFA treated Warner and how the world has reacted to that. It is now abundantly clear that Warner's decision to resign followed immediately after he had seen the Ethics Committee report. This could not have been more damning as it concluded he had "knowledge of the respective payments and condoned them. It seems quite likely that the accused [Warner] contributed himself to the relevant actions, thereby acting as an accessory to corruption".


FIFA then put out a statement regretting his departure, lavishly praising him and declaring that "as a consequence of Mr Warner's self-determined resignation, all Ethics Committee procedures against him have been closed and the presumption of innocence is maintained". But if FIFA thought this closed the long and often controversial football career of Jack Warner, consider how the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport reacted to this. Its report was scathing of how FIFA had handled the 2018 World Cup bids. And when I spoke to John Whittingdale, the chairman, he drew particular attention to the Warner episode.

Barely able to conceal his astonishment he said, "The Ethics Committee report we understand has serious questions to answer on the part of Jack Warner. He then resigns and FIFA says we don't need to do anything and will drop the investigation. That is extraordinary."

Now, FIFA stalwarts will argue, as they have, that once Warner resigned there was nothing they could do. FIFA is not a government organisation. It is, at the end of the day, a voluntary body. Even a national football association does not have to belong to FIFA. As we know, for several decades the British home nations chose to stay out. There are many who suggest they should now do the same again if FIFA cannot be reformed. FIFA has no police powers and no powers to summon non-members or those who are no longer members. As FIFA has itself discovered when dealing with unregistered football agents, it cannot touch them as they are not subject to FIFA's rules. All FIFA can do is impose sanctions on clubs and players who deal with such agents.

Interestingly, Whittingdale's committee also has limited powers. It can only summon British citizens, and it is worth nothing that during its investigation into the 2018 bid, neither David Dein, who played such a prominent part in the English bid, or Andy Anson, the chief executive of the bid, gave evidence. Dein said he could not come the day the committee had asked him to, but Whittingdale admitted to me Dein had not been keen to attend in any event. So if such a committee, which can provide parliamentary privilege enabling people to make serious allegations that cannot be done elsewhere (which proved very useful for Lord Triesman and the Sunday Times), then how much more limited are the powers of FIFA? FIFA may act as if it is a state but it has none of the powers a state has, nor the sort of powers Select Committees have.

So once Warner resigned it had to close shop on him. But the ham-handed way FIFA presented it made it appear as if it had exonerated him.

And this is where FIFA, and Blatter in particular, needs to show humility, something that has been in serious short supply in FIFA. This was the reason why it had such a long fight with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). FIFA insisted its procedures on drug testing were superior and caused such headaches WADA felt it was one of the most difficult sport organisation it had to deal with. Blatter has also claimed that FIFA's own Ethics Committee rules are superior to those of the IOC, and it is more transparent. In the light of the corruption scandal, this now sounds risible.


Blatter would do well to learn from Juan Antonia Samaranch, who in the wake of the Salt Lake City crisis, openly admitted the limitations of the IOC and how it cannot match that of a state. FIFA needs to do the same.

If it does not, then the fact that FIFA still has many, very fine people working for it, will get lost. Here, the evidence given by Guy Oliver to the Commons Select Committee is worth noting.

Oliver, who produces an Almanack that bears the moniker of FIFA.com, says he is "not an apologist for FIFA and that they do not exert any editorial control over my work".

In his written evidence, he is very critical of the England bid, calling it arrogant, but admits, "I am not in a position to say whether the workings of the FIFA Executive Committee are corrupt or not."

His most significant point is: "What I can be sure of is that the everyday working of FIFA by their hundreds of employees is anything but corrupt. Indeed, I have never dealt with an organisation that does everything quite so strictly by the book. This is where the real work of FIFA is done and to ask if FIFA is fit for purpose to run football, as many MPs have done, this is where you should be examining and not the Exco."

The problem is, organisations are judged, not by the many who are good, but by the few who are bad, and how the leaders deal with them. News International has learnt that to its cost. FIFA and Blatter need to heed that lesson. Otherwise, for all that the Ethics Committee might do, FIFA will be branded as a not fit for purpose organisation and call for its reform will grow. Blatter may well find himself in the unenviable position Rupert Murdoch is now in.

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 formerly the BBC's head sports editor.

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As any international athletics meeting promoter will tell you, you can't guarantee excitement. All you can do is assemble the best elements you can lay your hands on and hope the desired chemical reaction will occur.

Sometimes the very finest performers merely tick the box. Or it rains. Or things go unexpectedly wrong - as they did at the end of last Friday's Samsung Diamond League meeting in Paris, where a persistent problem with the starting equipment left a 200 metres field which included world record holder Usain Bolt fidgeting back and forth to its blocks as a mild evening turned cool.

The fact that Bolt, as he subsequently revealed, was suffering from what he described as "a flu" only made it more unfortunate.

The Diamond League meeting which followed Paris, in Birmingham, was not without flaw itself, although the hold ups to its climactic 100m event were brought about through events that fell within the competitive field as one runner was disqualified and there was another generally faulty start before Asafa Powell produced the kind of mid-race surge which will surely give him at least a fighting chance against his Jamaican friend and rival Bolt in this year's World Championships final.


That's if both men reach the final. And of course, that's if Powell brings his A game to the big occasion, as he often hasn't.

In a season which is already over, almost before it has begun, for the last man to defeat Bolt - Tyson Gay is recuperating from a hip operation which means he will not compete again until 2012 - it is sensible to remember that even the best laid plans can go awry, and that some plans don't even get a chance to be properly laid.

Such is the uncertainty of sport, without which the whole moving spectacle would be profoundly diminished.

But as he relaxed in the meeting hotel bar last Sunday night, Birmingham's meeting organiser Ian Stewart looked understandably happy with life. It had been one of those athletics occasions which just takes off.

Of course, it always helps if the home crowd have a home victory or two to cheer, which they did here on the track through two of Britain's European champions - 400m hurdler Dai Greene, and 5,000m runner Mo Farah.

But it was the audacious nature of those two victories, and others such as Sally Pearson's Oceania Area record under maximum pressure in the 100m hurdles, and Blanka Vlašić's exuberant success in the high jump which set her back on course for the World Championships following heavy defeat at her previous Diamond League meeting in Lausanne, which generated unmistakeable excitement.


And that excitement reverberated as never before in a stadium which had just opened its imposing back-straight stand, which has replaced what was for so many years a grassy bank which would sometimes have temporary seating arranged upon it.

Well might the double Olympic champion Lord Coe, whose memories of this stadium will never be entirely fond given his traumatic failure in the trials held there before the Seoul Games of 1988, have praised Birmingham City Council's achievement in creating what he described as "a world class facility".

For many present - given that the other British Diamond League meeting apart from London took place in Gateshead last season - this was the first real glimpse of the spaceship-like presence across the infield which, it has just been confirmed, will become Planet Earth for UK Athletics when the national governing body shifts across the city from Solihull in October.


The presence of a serious section of the crowd bang in front of the pole vault runway, where Blackburn's 19-year-old record breaker Holly Bleasdale came so close to earning what would have been the first Diamond League - or indeed Golden League - victory for a female British field athlete - increased the atmosphere exponentially.

What was most thrillingly in evidence on Sunday night was ambition - tangible, in the shape of the stadium which demonstrates the commitment of a council that has also arranged to host the US team for their pre-Olympic preparations next year, understood, in the case of Farah, Greene, Pearson, Vlašić et al.

As far as the tangible ambition was concerned, inevitably, questions are now being asked in council about how best to earn money back from this £12.5 million ($20.2 million) investment. But the fact that UKA has elected to settle itself there rather than seeking a place in the Olympic Stadium in Stratford says much for the validity of the Second City's sporting aspirations.

All told, the Alexander Stadium provided an evening of athletics which made sense of the sport.

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.

There is nothing else in sports quite as riveting as the moment of the announcement of a host city for the Olympic Games, even now.

Sometimes awkward, refreshingly devoid of the mind-numbing faux drama and choreographed hype of similar revelations - see the first pick in the NBA or NFL drafts - it still inspires me still after watching International Olympic Committee Presidents tear open the envelope and reveal to the world the name of the cities that have held the Games from Lake Placid to London.

I was drawn to the live television feed last week from Durban and the IOC President Jacques Rogge's envelope moment when it came that Pyeongchang had won the right to host the 2018 Winter Olympics.

I felt the same electric jolt that struck me in times past when I exhaled after hearing the voices of Lord Killanin and Juan Antonio Samaranch saying to the world, "Lake Placid, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City."

So, now these Winter Games return for the third time to Asia, and to a nation sustained and carried forward in history by Americans in uniform from 1950-1953, almost 55,000 of them killed and another 103,000 wounded. The old bitterness and tensions remain on the Peninsula, and the Demilitarised Zone actually runs through the Gangwon Province where the Games will be staged, but there is joy there right now.

As I watched the event last week, it brought me memories of the drama that unfolded in Seoul in the autumn of 1988 when Samaranch orchestrated the participation of 160 nations in the Games following successive boycotts in Montreal, Moscow and Los Angeles that nearly destroyed the Olympic Movement. As the Opening Ceremony unfolded on September 17 in the late afternoon at Seoul's Olympic Stadium, Cuba and North Korea were absent, but it didn't matter, the world had come together again at the Games.

I was staying at the just-opened Intercontinental Hotel, a few blocks from the Main Press Centre and was enjoying the benefits of a personal driver and security agent, who had met me at the airport two weeks before and insisted that they were mine for the duration of the Games because, in their words, I was a "high Olympic official". I also had some unusual guests at the hotel on my floor, including the soon-to-be Olympic champion Florence Griffith Joyner, her husband Al Joyner, the track and field legend Edwin Moses, and their agent, Gordon Baskin.

We had helped Baskin out after the Olympic Trials when he contacted me about wanting hotel accommodations for his stars in a place where they could enjoy rest, quiet and be away from the adoring Koreans, who were mesmerised by Flo-Jo, her flowing hair, long, colorful fingernails, and powerful strides on the track. It developed that my driver and security agent, a Seoul police officer, packed Florence and Al into my vehicle each day and we took them to the track for practices, then picked them up and returned them to the hotel while I spent my hours at the Press Centre.

The images of Flo-Jo (pictured) flying down the track to gold medals in the 100 metres in 10.62sec and 200m in a world record 21.34 remain among our nation's most vivid memories.


When we took her to the airport to depart on October 3, she was mobbed at the entrance, but took time for a quick picture with my driver and security man, and when she kissed them on their cheeks, it made the pages of a thousand publications across the nation. That picture remains with me now, and it appeared to me even as I presided at her memorial service in Indianapolis in 1998 after her tragic death.

But there are other moments, stored now in my mind's eye, from those Games in Korea that beguile. Being a human shield as we marched Carl Lewis into a press conference after Canada's Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal for steroid use and a failed drug test. Watching, holding my breath as Evelyn Ashford took a baton from Flo-Jo and made up a ten-metres deficit on her anchor leg to roar past East Germany's Marlies Göhr in the women's 4x100m relay at the tape in 41.98, sitting in the stands as the American men's basketball team lost to the Soviets, 82-76, not knowing that this disappointment and bronze medal would lead to the historic decision by FIBA to admit professionals to the Games and the 1992 Dream Team in Barcelona, and getting to see Matt Biondi and Janet Evans (pictured) amaze audiences in the pool at the Jamsil Indoor venue.


It was also the beginning of the end of the ugly, methodical sport machines of the Soviet Union and East Germany, which went 1-2 in the medals race again, with 132 and 102 medals to the 94 won by the United States. The Koreans were in love with the Games, and their place on the world stage. Their pride shown in hundreds of ways - they were great fans at the venues, and wonderful hosts, especially the older Koreans who were there as kids when the USA helped the young nation survive and open the doors to prosperity in 1953

There remains one story that is among my fondest moments among so many over the 14 Olympics that I enjoyed. The United States Olympic Committee was well-known by 1988 for helpful systems and sensitivity to the needs of the hundreds of American journalists and broadcasters who covered the Games, because it was our chance to give our athletes the attention and spotlight that would be theirs once only in four years. Beginning in Lake Placid in 1980, we had created daily media briefings and access to our teams and athletes at the Main Press Centre and venues, something no other nation did, and it had become our signature of sorts.

Here were America's best and brightest, for all the writers and broadcasters from around the world and back home, and thousands of compelling stories told for the first time to millions. But, when we arrived in Seoul in early September, we were told that the manager of the Main Press Centre would not allow the USOC to stage media briefings with its athletes there, because it was unfair to the other nations and would be selfish.

No chance to deliver what we had become best at, a blow to our whole operation. But one morning at breakfast at 6am in the hotel's otherwise empty dining room, I met the only other person eating at that hour, the venerable, lionised public relations executive Harold Burson, the founder of global PR firm Burson-Marsteller, my own Mickey Mantle or Stan Musial! BM had represented Seoul in the chase for the Games and during the events, and after we shared a table, I told him about our problems at the Main Press Centre related to media access to our athletes.

Burson, who remains a cherished friend and advisor to this day, suggested that I get an audience with the executive in charge of international public relations, and arranged that meeting for me the next day. The meeting was in an office above the Main Press Centre, and when I met the Organising Committee executive, I noted at least a dozen pictures on his walls of Wimbledon and its tennis greats. It turned out he had served in London at his nation's consulate and was a tennis fan of immense proportions. When he heard my plea about being able to conduct major press briefings, he seemed sympathetic, but unmoved.

As the issue appeared to be dead in the water, I managed a final try. We would bring our US Olympic tennis team to his Centre the next day, to show him what we had in mind, and how the USOC staged these opportunities not only for American media, but for the world's news corps as well. This team was made up of professionals as the sport returned to the Games for the first time in 64 years and included Pam Shriver, Chris Evert, Zina Garrison, Ken Flach, Robert Seguso, Tim Mayotte and Brad Gilbert. That was the game-changer, and he stood, extended his hand, and invited us to bring the team in for the audition the following morning. As the team gathered in the morning in our USOC media office in their red, white and blue Olympic uniforms, it struck me that our man might like to meet Chris Evert in his office before the event, so Chris and I went upstairs to his office.

I told the staffer at the desk that I was there with Miss Evert to say hello and to thank him. He overheard me and appeared in the doorway in a second with a huge smile and beckoned us to sit down. Chris, the Wimbledon champion in 1974, 1976 and 1981, presented him with an autographed tennis racquet and a US Olympic Team pin set. A photographer was summoned, and she posed with him for a dozen shots.

Oh, the media briefing went off without a hitch, with a couple hundred writers and TV types there to see the team, and we were invited to hold as many future media sessions as we wished in the Main Press auditorium. It was the first of roughly 50 that Bob Condron, my sidekick and press operations genius, would stage during those days now 23 years ago in Korea. But it was the best one.

Mike Moran was the chief spokesman for the United States Olympic Committee for a quarter century, through thirteen Games, from Lake Placid to Salt Lake City. He joined the USOC in 1978 as it left New York City for Colorado Springs. He was the Senior Communications Counselor for NYC2012, New York City's Olympic bid group from 2003-2005 and is now a media consultant

When Charles van Commenee meets Britain's sports journalists over a Fleet Street lunch this week doubtless he will be grilled about his apparent eagerness to promote athletes from overseas who conveniently are able to switch nationalities and compete for Team GB at the expense of some home-grown talent.

It is not something confined to athletics. Half the England cricket team sound as if they have stepped off a plane from Jo'burg. Actually most of them have.

However van Commenee could turn tables and ask whether British sport could actually survive without a little help from abroad, not just on the track and field but in preparing for the Olympics.

For he is just one of over 50 imports whose expertise has become an integral part of the games we play, and how we play them.

When Fabio Capello took charge of English football almost four years ago as a generale surrounded by Italian lieutenants, he succeeded earlier mercenary Sven-Göran Eriksson as numero uno of a foreign legion that has undertaken the biggest invasion of these shores since the Romans.

British sport is now commanded by a platoon of coaches hired overseas, all recruited in the frantic quest for Olympic glory.

My research for the Independent on Sunday has revealed that in all, at least 21 of the 26 sports in which Team GB will compete in London will have performance directors or senior coaches who have been expensively head-hunted from Australia to the Ukraine via China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Hungary, Holland, Switzerland and the United States, spanning four continents and 28 nations.


They range from Jurgen Grobler (pictured), the East German émigré who for many years has been behind the phenomenal success of British rowing, to Biz Price, the Canadian synchronised swimming Svengali now putting a smile on the face of Britain's water babes, and a Korean professor, Won Jae Moon, whose expertise has enabled British Olympic hopefuls in taekwondo to start beating his own nation's stars in the homeland which invented the sport.

Only three Olympic sports - boxing, hockey and shooting - will definitely embark on 2012 with all-British coaching set-ups. Tennis and football have yet to formulate their plans. It is likely both will have Britons in overall charge, though tennis will permit foreign coaches to work with individual players such as Andy Murray.

For the rest, Exchequer and Lottery funding distributed by UK Sport has facilitated the hiring of top quality coaches from overseas.

In all there are 52 foreigners working as coaches at various coaching levels in 21 Olympic sports (see coaches below).

Several are on six-figure salaries. Van Commenee, the Dutch disciplinarian brought in to succeed axed Briton Dave Collins as performance director is probably most handsomely rewarded, believed to earn approaching £200,000 ($319,000) a year, although his the total wage bill probably is only around half the £6 million ($9.6 million) trousered annually by Capello.

There is no doubt that most British sports have been enhanced by foreign stewardship. So while the Union Jack may be flying high over the Olympic Park just over a year from now perhaps fluttering alongside should be that of the United Nations.

Some sports are totally dominated by foreign coaches. Gymnastics has five, two from Russia and others from Ukraine, Romania and Canada working under Dutch-born technical director Eddie Van Hoof.


Britain's modern pentathletes went into last weekend's World Cup at Greenwich with Jan Bartu (pictured), an ex-Olympian who competed for Czechoslovakia, heading a coaching unit of a Hungarian, Slovakian and Swiss, while Dave Brailsford's high achieving cycling squad have coaches from Australia, Germany, Belgium and South Africa.

No other nation has such an international collection of coaches, and the man largely responsible for this is 2012 chief Sebastian Coe who declared after London won the bid six years ago: "It is very simple. If quality coaches aren't available here, you go for the best available elsewhere." His advice has been followed implicitly.

But why are good British coaches in such a minority? Why have there been no British successors to men like Coe's own father, Peter, who coached him to two Olympic gold medals? Steve Cram, a Coe contemporary, who also had a home-grown coach, Jimmy Hedley, has said: "Jimmy was the sort of bloke who'd be there every night. He gave up 50 years of his life and never received a penny. These people are not being replaced and there is a massive shortfall of professional coaches that is threatening to undermine the legacy of 2012. We need a career path for British coaches because we are not keeping pace with other countries."

So why isn't there one?

It is 16 years since Frank Dick stepped out of the athletics arena, quitting as Britain's national coaching guru after the most illustrious spell the sport has known. He overlorded an inspired era when all that glittered on the track really did turn to gold - from Coe, Cram, Ovett and Thompson through to Christie, Jackson and Gunnell.


Dick (pictured),70, president of the European Coaches Association and chair of Scottish Athletics, believes Britain does not take coaching seriously enough as a profession and that his own sport failed to prepare thoroughly enough for the future. And he fears some sports could go into decline when the Olympic cash runs out after 2012 and they are unable to continue paying for overseas aid.

He says: "There has been an extraordinary negligence in developing our own coaches stretching back 20 years and it has now become that little bit sexier to bring in someone with a foreign accent. But if you do that you need a strategy to support it. You must make sure that when they move on you have people to replace them from within our own ranks.

"I was very lucky because I had some exceptional coaches around me, but they were not young, and that's the nub of the problem. There is a dearth of good young coaches. It seems to me we have lost a generation somewhere and if you want to fill in that gap by bringing in foreign coaches you must be able to ensure that they are able to influence and develop home coaching talent. You need coaching apprentices like the American system."

But are British coaches willing to look, listen and learn? Dick recalls: "As a young coach myself I remember travelling from Edinburgh, crossing the Channel, then taking a train all the way to Budapest, simply to stand outside the warm-up areas to watch what was happening. How many are prepared to do that today?"

He adds: "We also seem to have a growing confusion about who is running the show these days. We have people out there called performance directors and managers, we have coaches and all sorts of specialists and it does seem to me that they disconnect. We must join up the dots and not just be looking for short term success."

"To be fair to UK Sport they've run a World Class Coaching scheme trying to give an elite coaching experience to home grown coaches. That will certainly be necessary because I cannot see the majority of sports being able to maintain so many foreign coaches when the caravan moves on after 2012 because of the economic downturn. Unfortunately many sports do not have a Plan B.

"Basically we have said to our coaches, you are not good enough so, we are bringing in coaches from abroad. But when the money is not there are we going to turn to those same coaches we have rejected and expect them to work for less money?"

Decathlon champion Daley Thompson was among the top athletes coached by Dick. "With his charisma and knowledge he would be a great coach, but they didn't' seem to want him," he said.

Thompson, part of the team that helped secure the 2012 Olympics for London, is one of many former Olympic and world gold medallists who have been shunned or put off coaching by the increasing bureaucracy.

"There's so much red tape and paper work," he says. "The second biggest resource to talent in athletics is experience. Yet over the last 15 years that experience has simply been wasted. Just look at the world-class athletes Britain has produced over the years, guys like Seb Coe, Steve Cram and Steve Ovett, yet none are involved in coaching. I would be more than happy to help the national cause. I've never been asked."

"Coaches have always had problems with the blazerati who don't like their noses put out of joint," argues Tom McNab, one of Dick's predecessors. "Consequently we have not created that core of tough, hard-bitten professional coaches which is why we have had to import them. Men like Bill Sweetenham who came from Australia to give swimming the kick up the arse it needed and changed its culture.

"There have been many good British coaches in the past, people like Wilf Paish and Denis Watts up in the north, but where are their successors? Sadly in so many sports there is a vacuum."

British Swimming's chief executive David Sparkes is more sanguine about the future of coaching here: "I believe in swimming we have some potentially world class young coaches coming through who are being helped by our foreign coaches. We train around 12,000 instructors and coaches a year and need 20,000 to meet the demand. But Britain does need more coherent financial investment in coaching at all levels."

Dick adds: "Coaching has been badly neglected and must be made a much more attractive career. The biggest single legacy we can pass on to the world through the London Olympics is how we lead, how we coach and how we can change the sporting world to make it a better place. We have this influx of foreign expertise, so for goodness sake make sure that when that flame goes down in 2012 we have a very serious legacy to pass on to the future of sport."

But by then how many British coaches will have missed the bus?

Britain's Foreign Legion

Aquatics
Swimming
Performance dir: Michael Scott (Australia)
Head coach: Dennis Pursey (USA)

Diving: Alexie Evangulov (Russia)

Synch swimming: Biz Price (Canada)

Water polo
Men: Cristian Lordache (Romania)
Women: Szilveszter Fekete (Hungary)

Athletics: Charles Van Commenee (Holland)

Archery: Lloyd Brown (USA)

Badminton
Performance dir: Jens Grill (Denmark)
Head Coach: Kenneth Jonassen (Denmark)

Basketball: Chris Spice (Australia)

Canoeing
Head coach: Brendan Purcell (Australia)
Men: Alex Nikonorov (Ukraine)
Women: Miklos Simon (Hungary)
Slalom: Jurg Gotz (Switzerland)

Cycling
Performance mgr:Shane Sutton (Australian)
Sprint: Jan van Eijden (German)
BMX: Grant White (Australian)
Carer: Luc de Wilde (Belgian)
Carer: Hanlie Perry (South Africa)

Equestrian
Eventing: Yogi Breisner (Sweden)
Show jumping mgr: Rob Hoekstra (Holland)

Fencing: Ziemiek Wojciechowski (Poland)

Gymnastics: Andrei Popov (Russia)
Assisted by: Sergei Sizhanov (Russia) and Alex Shyraev (Ukraine)
Women: Adrian Stan (Romania) and Carol Orchard (Canada)
Technical dir: Eddie Van Hoof (Holland)

Handball: Dragan Djukic (Serbia)
Assisted by: Jure Sterbucl (Slovenia) and Rolf Dobler (Switzerland)
Women head: Jesper Holmris (Denmark)
Assisted by: Vigdis Holmeset (Norway)

Judo: Patrick Roux (France)
Assisted by: Aurelien Brussal (France), Tsuyoshi Tsunoda (Japan) and Yuko Nakano (Japan)

Modern Pentathlon
Performance dir: Jan Bartu (Czech Rep)
Women head: Istvan Nemeth (Hungary)
Men head: Philipp Waeffler (Switzerland)

Fencing: Frici Foldes (Slovakia)

Rowing
Men: Jurgen Grobler (Germany)
Women: Paul Thompson (Australia)

Sailing
Men 470 perf coach: Morgan Reeser (USA)
Women match racing: Maurice Parden-Kooper (Holland)

Table Tennis
Mens: Jia-Yi-Liu (China)

Taekwondo: Prof Won Jae Moon (Korea)

Triathlon: Ben Bright (New Zealand)

Weightlifting: Tamas Feher (Hungary)

Volleyball: Harry Brokking (Holland)

Wrestling: Nikolai Kornyeyev (Ukraine)

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.

Football politics is a murky world at the best of times but the experience I have just encountered has made me question whether there are dark and evil forces at play.

The other day I received an email from my mobile phone supplier asking me whether I wanted to reset my password. What password? I've never had a password for my mobile phone. My gut instinct - and thank goodness I acted on it - was to call the company concerned and ask them what was going on.

In a nutshell, it transpired that someone, somewhere was trying to open an online account, purporting to be me, in order to gain access to my phone records and find out, among other things, who I had been calling and who had been calling me. Whoever it was knew so many details about me they easily managed to pass strict data protection criteria. Big Brother, it seemed, was watching over me. Pretty scary, eh?

There is considerable information I am not at liberty to divulge for fear of compromising the case which is now in the hands of the fraud department of the mobile company concerned. But suffice to say that if this kind of thing can happen to me, it can surely happen to others too.

In fact it has. I know of one other journalist also covering football politics who has had a similar - and in some ways even more serious - experience. He, too, is wracking his brains as to who the phantom hacker might be and how the person concerned managed to glean so much personal information in an effort to acquire his mobile phone records.

Without pointing the finger at anyone in particular, what these episodes show is that there are some desperate people who will resort to desperate measures. I recently read a report which pointed out that a number of FIFA personalities caught up in the various corruption scandals that have plagued world football's governing body had been hiring private investigators. Am I the victim of one of these private eyes? Sounds fanciful doesn't it, but in these kinds of situations, all rational thought goes out of the window and the mind starts playing tricks on you.

Maybe I am being paranoid. Maybe the would-be hacker has nothing to do with the job I perform and has randomly selected me as an easy target. After all, you hear these kinds of stories all the time. But given that my friend has suffered the same intrusion at roughly the same time, I have my doubts. The bottom line is that we are in a sensitive business where the reputations and credibility of some of the most influential and powerful figures count for everything.

Andrew Warshaw is a former sports editor of The European, the newspaper that broke the Bosman story in the 1990s, the most significant issue to shape professional football as we know it today. Before that, he worked for the Associated Press for 13 years in Geneva and London. He is now the chief football reporter for insideworldfootball. To follow him on Twitter click here.

Britain's modern pentathletes have been offering the ultimate evidence of their dedication to the cause of fitness for the last fortnight. They've been following in Paula Radcliffe's footsteps.

The British team preparing for this weekend's World Cup final in London - the 2012 test event will host the fencing and swimming at the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre before moving operations to Greenwich Park for the riding and run/shoot elements - have been working hard at altitude in the training venue where Britain's world marathon record holder has spent so much of her time in the past decade.

Did I say "very hard"? Make that "very, very hard". The second version is the verdict delivered by the man who has overseen more than a dozen years of medal-winning success as the GB Performance Director - Jan Bartu.

"We have been training at between 1,800 and 2,100 metres altitude," he reports. "It's not bone-breaking, but the effect of training for two weeks at this altitude is significant."

You get the feeling that if actual bone-breaking training was seen to be efficacious in the grand scheme of things, it might well be considered.

Five Britons have qualified to compete at Crystal Palace and Greenwich Park - Jamie Cooke and Nick Weybridge go in the men's competition tomorrow, and the women's team for the following day comprises Heather Fell, Freyja Prentice and Mhairi Spence.

It is the first of three big modern pentathlon events this year along with the European Championships, which will be held in Medway three weeks afterwards, and the World Championships, which will take place in Moscow from September 8-14. All three events will contribute towards automatic qualification places for London 2012.

But no matter how well Britain's competitors do this year, there is a stark bottom line. A maximum of two men and two women can qualify for London 2012. For the women, who have five of six competitors with a potential chance, the maths is particularly cruel.


Fell (pictured) has already survived the process once, going on to win silver at the Beijing Games. But those Games reverberate with a different meaning for Spence, who missed the cut by one place in 2008 and had the bittersweet experience of watching it as part of a scheme being run for talented fringe members by the British Olympic Association.

"The last Olympic cycle was a bit difficult for me, and I am aware now that this is my last chance to achieve my dream," she said. "The fact that the Olympic Games is on home soil is a massive motivation for me. But the level of competition within the squad is so great that there is a long way to go before I can say I am going to be there on the day competing.

"In a way it was a really good idea to take us to Beijing in order to experience the Games. We went to the holding camp in Macau, and then on to Beijing. We saw the Olympic Village. It was something I could use in the future. But it was a little bit of a teaser in one sense. I said to myself: 'I want to be there for real rather than watching on the sidelines.'

"It was a really tough time for me mentally. I had qualified in third place, but only two women could compete in Beijing. My confidence took a knock, and it took me a while to find the inner strength to try again. But there were two girls who were better than me, so they deserved to compete at the Games. For me it was a situation of sheer desperation and despair. I want to do everything humanly possible to make sure I'm not in that situation next year.

"But the fact that there are several of us fighting for those two places benefits us all in one way, because it means whoever qualifies will need to be in the best shape possible to challenge for medals, and we need medals to maintain our funding for the next four years. So while I will be giving 100 per cent to be one of the two who go to the Games, if it is not me I will support whoever it is because we all want to make sure of the future of our sport."

Prentice also spoke to me earlier this year about the mix of pressure and support on offer at the team's base in the University of Bath.

"We have great facilities here," she said. "We have amazing nutritional support, conditioning, we have sports masseurs, physios, everyone at our beck and call. If we have any problems the medics are on it straight away, specialist sports doctors, psychologists. We have everything.

"But then it puts on the pressure. Everything is building you up to this competition. It does have extra pressure. And there is a cut, and only selected athletes can make that."

So what does the man who makes the final decisions have to say about all this angst?

"Let's make one thing absolutely clear," Bartu told me. "The athletes who will in the end be in the Olympic team - they earned it. It's not going to be political decision.

"This group will fight for the selection. It's going to be decided in competition - their performance will determine. So in that respect it is a self-managing process.

"Now we know there will be disappointments, there will be heartbreaking situations for athletes and coaches coming up. We need to prepare for this as a team. Because we go through this together and there is a future after the Games. It's not the end of the world.

"Everybody must understand. It's life, isn't it? Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. That philosophical approach I would suggest to all athletes on the starting grid. You have your life, this is fantastic, sport, Olympics medals, but there are more important things in life than that. So let's get perspective.

"After the Games we have the World Championships, another Games coming up in four years – see the bigger picture of what's going on. I hope that this approach should help us to keep the dynamics positive so we will be focussing on how to beat the opposition and not to compete inside the team. That could be detrimental to our hopes. It has to be that that aggression goes outwards.

"The selection is made at the last minute. You stay on your toes. And that's how it's supposed to be because we did the same thing for Beijing and Athens. The purpose of it is you need to continue working hard. There's no room for complacency. And that gives you confidence to go out and compete as best you can."

A harsh philosophy perhaps. But count the Olympic medals: Gold and bronze in Sydney, bronze in Athens, silver in Beijing. You strongly feel there is another on its way in London 2012...

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.