In a break between contests at the European Junior Weightlifting Championships in Eilat, a two-year-old boy runs on to the competition platform and plays with the three smallest discs that weigh half a kilo, one kilo and 1.5 kilos, lifting them from the rack and trying to slide them on to a bar.

Although the design of the Tokyo stadium has been revised from the late Zaha Hadid’s original plans, it is still expected to be a magnificent backdrop for the 2020 Olympics. It will be the first time that two entirely different arenas on the same site have both staged the Games.

US President Elect Donald Trump has called International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach to "express his strong support" for Los Angeles 2024. 

Rugby’s return to the Olympics this summer - after a 92-year absence - ended, figuratively speaking, in an exhilarating run to the try line followed by a touch down between the posts. If any International Olympic Committee (IOC) members were undecided over the sport’s claim to a core place in the Games, the drama and excitement of the sevens game appears to have converted them.

It all sounds very familiar. Warnings about the lack of progress from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), disputes over venues, delays in construction, strikes by workers, health concerns and even a team of refugees. But this is not a tale from Rio 2016 but 60 years ago. 

Haile Gebrselassie was at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center in Athens on Friday (November 11) night to receive a Lifetime Achievement award from the International Association of Marathons and Road Races (AIMS).

Having worked in anti-doping for more than three decades, I am hugely disappointed and frustrated with the present state of anti-doping. 

Restless - that was how I would sum up the atmosphere at the Sportel international sports marketing and media industry convention in Monaco last week.

There is much talk at present in the sports world and elsewhere of the threat of a new cold war.

So here’s the problem with gymnastics. Unlike athletics and swimming, the other big beasts of the Olympics, it requires judging; and getting judgements to match performances is the abiding challenge for a sport that has been part of the modern Games since the inaugural running at Athens in 1896.

Male and female cyclists will have equal shares in two things at least at the International Cycling Union (UCI) World Road Championships that get underway today in the Qatari capital of Doha - pulverising heat and, for the first time, prize money.

Birmingham’s decision to join Liverpool in planning to bid for the 2026 Commonwealth Games has further energised preparations for the Commonwealth Games Federation’s (CGF) General Assembly in Edmonton, which CGF chief executive David Grevemberg describes as “unlike any before".

New UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin has been revealing more about what the next European Championships in 2020 will actually look like. "It will be a true celebration of the game we all love and cherish," he said.

Next Thursday on September 22 marks the 28th anniversary of what many believe, for all the controversies of Rio 2016, was the lowest point for boxing at the Olympics - the moment when a referee was attacked by home officials at the 1988 Games in Seoul after a decision had gone against a South Korean bantamweight, Byun Jong-il, who subsequently delayed the competition for more than an hour by occupying the ring.

When the Paralympic Games close a week from now in Rio, the Japanese flag will be raised and all eyes will look towards Tokyo. They were doing the same exactly 80 years ago when the Berlin Olympics of 1936 came to an end.