Lyn Orbell has been a volunteer at Birchfield Harriers athletics club for more than 40 years. She’s worked as a team manager, a coach, an administrator, a tea-maker, a sweeper-upper…you name it.  And right now she is feeling very excited about the prospect of watching World Championship athletics in the Olympic Stadium next summer – a prospect that has been made virtually certain by the recent ticketing announcement made by the organisers of London 2017. She is bang in the centre of their target…

Less than a decade ago, the Youth Olympic Games did not even exist, but some 1,100 sporting youngsters will descend on the Norwegian town of Lillehammer for the second edition of the Winter event, due to take place from February 12 to 21.

As International Hockey Federation (FIH) President Leandro Negre jokingly said during his speech to guests at the recent Hockey Writers' Club lunch at the Royal Thames Yacht Club in London, the Spanish are no strangers to revolution.

A hundred years ago the Olympics were scheduled for Berlin, but they never took place because of war. The 1916 Games were the first to be cancelled in the modern era.

The New Year promises no lessening of the turmoil and controversy within which football’s international governing body, FIFA, is currently embroiled. And while the game continues to purge itself of the corruption which appears to have reached so many of its loftiest branches, its roots – namely, the Laws of The Game – are also subject to imminent, sweeping change.

The great Jesse Owens embodied the Olympic ideal with his deeds at the stadium but long after his sporting career was over, he spoke in unforgettable fashion at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. In the forty years since then, few have come closer to encapsulating the Olympic spirit.

This year’s Female Age Group British Triathlete of the Year, 70-year-old Georgina Jennings, is a testament to triathlon’s power to attract and retain competitors.

The old English proverb "like father, like son" could do with a couple of minor additions for the purpose of this article.

"Good governance and autonomy are strongly linked; they are two sides of the same coin.” This maxim, taken from the background document to the Olympic Agenda 2020 proposals approved almost exactly a year ago by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), meeting in Monaco, encapsulates why 2015 has been such a disastrous year for advocates of maximum autonomy for sports organisations.

If British television show Family Fortunes was to ask 100 people to name a body related to the Paralympic Movement, I am pretty certain the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) would be the top answer.

It’s a truism that every Olympic sport, and indeed every aspiring Olympic sport, wants to grow. You don’t hear a lot of International Federation Presidents talking in urgent tones about the need to reduce participation. But the question of growth is complex – does it mean more people, or does it mean people doing better?

Sir Bradley Wiggins is a man accustomed to making history, having set the world hour cycling record earlier this year after becoming the first Briton to win the Tour de France back in 2012.

Canoe slalom is one of the bumpiest of sports events, but José Perurena, President of the International Canoe Federation (ICF), is expecting a smooth ride for the Rio 2016 Test event due to take place at the end of this month at the Whitewater Stadium within the Deodoro Olympic Park.

In our world, most on-the-record interviews are notably restrained affairs. Respondents are invariably fearful of deviating from the script and offending others, and have PR assistants lurking ominously close-by to ensure the “key message” comes across.

To me, the July 2005 vote to decide the host of the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics conjures memories of a school trip to the Tower of London, fittingly enough, with a friend suddenly interrupting a lecture about the illustrious history of the city to bring tidings of a latest triumph.