It is sport’s impossible job. Brazil football manager? No problem. Groundsman at Wimbledon? A stroll in the park. International Olympic Committee (IOC) President? A piece of cake.

Got, got, need. If you are an avid collector of football sticker albums in Britain, you will be all too familiar with that sequence of words, currently doing the rounds once again with the recent release of Panini’s latest edition for this year’s European Championships.

There’s good news and bad at the London Aquatics Centre in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park this month. The bad news - there will be no public access to the gym, fitness classes, competition pool, training pool, diving pool or crèche. The good news - this inconvenience is occasioned by the hosting of the European Aquatics Championships, the last big marker before Rio 2016. The last time this event took place in Britain was 1993.

My first experience of ice hockey politics came during a press conference in Sochi midway through the 2014 Winter Olympics, where world governing body chief René Fasel appeared alongside National Hockey League (NHL) Commissioner Gary Bettman.

In a simple but emotional moment, the Olympic flame will be carried this Tuesday (April 26) by Syrian swimmer Ibrahim Al Hussein at the Eleonas Refugee Camp in Athens. Ibrahim had part of his leg amputated, but still swims and plays wheelchair basketball.

When high priestess Katerina Lehou kindles the 2016 Olympic flame next Thursday, one person will be watching more intently than anyone else. Choreographer Artemis Ignatiou is responsible for every last detail of the flame lighting ceremony in Ancient Olympia.

As the final preparations are laid for the 120th running of the Boston Marathon on April 18, the event has taken on an additional resonance that is a legacy of the bombings which claimed the lives of three people and injured more than 360 others close to the finish line of the 2013 race.

Late last year, the calls for cricket to regain its place as an Olympic sport became increasingly loud and as vociferous as they had ever been.

Two years ago Kamloops, in Canada, staged the Four Nations Cup, which served as a warm-up event for the Ice Hockey Women’s World Championships it is about to host. After the home country had earned a 3-2 shoot-out win over the United States, such was the level of general enthusiasm that young female fans were still outside the arena playing street hockey at midnight.

As the London 1908 Olympics began, Bishop Ethelbert Talbot of Pennsylvania gave a sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral. He suggested that the struggle was more important than the prize. In the congregation that day was International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Very impressed by what he heard, Coubertin adapted the words to form the Olympic creed.

If the 2024 Games eventually come to the United States the Olympic flame will be making its way to California, rather than Oregon. But the latter state is about to revive its own honoured sporting flame - two decades after it died down to embers - as it prepares to host the International Association of Athletics Federations’ (IAAF) World Indoor Championships.

To what sporting occasion does this four-city sequence relate? Paris, Gothenburg, Prague, London.

This week in London, the world’s top track cyclists will be hoping to land a double blow to their rivals at the Lee Valley Velopark. A total of 19 titles are due to be decided at the International Cycling Union’s (UCI) annual Track World Cycling Championships across the duration of the five-day event.

After 18-years at the helm, FIFA’s eighth President is set to leave the football body facing its worst-ever crisis. Had he stepped down earlier, however, Sepp Blatter’s political epitaph would have been very different.

After the darkest year in the 112-year history of FIFA, acting President Issa Hayatou will soon announce the name of only the ninth full time leader of football’s world governing body.