Today marks 100 years since "the war to end all wars" came to an end. The guns fell silent at the 11th hour of the 11th day in the 11th month in 1918.

Starting this Friday (November 9), Norway's 27-year-old chess player Magnus Carlsen, the world champion since 2013, will defend his title against Fabiano Caruana, who is a year his junior.

The decision to award Russia the 2020 European Weightlifting Championships on the same day its one-year suspension from the sport expired on October 17 was certainly a bold one.

La Liga President Javier Tebas certainly did not mince his words at last week's SPORTELMonaco convention, describing opposition to plans to play a match in the near future in the United States as "sporting puritanism".

For some - no, for many cities, the experience of having an Olympic bid aborted would deflate ambitions for major sporting expansion. Not so for Budapest, which today stages the official opening of the World Wrestling Championships, the latest in a dizzying succession of top international events taking place in the Hungarian capital.

Politics has been intermingled with sport in every one of the modern Olympics. That mixture was at its most violent and shocking at the 1972 Munich Games, when the Palestinian Black September group took 11 Israeli Olympic team members hostage, seeking a release of prisoners, and ended up killing them along with a West German police officer.

Thomas Bach has been forced to deal with several considerable challenges during his tenure as President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The Olympic flame reaches a low point in its history today - but only in the literal sense.

It was 4.30am when the phone rang in my room at the media village in Seoul on September 27, 1988. "Get your backside down to the press centre, there’s a massive story breaking," urged my good friend John  Goodbody, of The Times. "Ben Johnson’s been done for doping!”

On Friday (September 21), David Lappartient will have been International Cycling Union (UCI) President for a year, having succeeded Britain's Brian Cookson.

As the 48th World Rowing Championships get underway in Bulgaria today, one might imagine a small wreath bobbing about on the Plovdiv Rowing Venue course in memory of the late and lamented lightweight men's coxless four (LM4-) event that had its last outing at last year's World Championships at Sarasota-Bradenton in Florida.

Russia was reduced to the status of a provisional, non-voting member of the International Biathlon Union (IBU) on December 10 of last year. Yet it remains central to the prospects and fortunes of this beleaguered international sports federation which has, in the space of the last three years, plumbed depths unmatched - as yet - by any other.

The phrase "end of an era" is much overused, particularly in sport. Yet one has little hesitation in applying it to the change at the top that is about to take place in shooting.

The Asian Games have returned to Jakarta this summer and opened yesterday in the very Gelora Bung Karno Main Stadium built to hold that event back in 1962.