I’ll be perfectly honest – when I went on Sunday to the 65th English Open Table Tennis Championships at the impressive English Institute of Sport (EIS) in Sheffield – I didn’t know all that much about the sport.
 

But before you criticise me too much, I did know some of the basics.
 

With only 100 days to go until the start of the 2010 Olympic Games, we still have 100 days to make a real difference for our athletes as they prepare for Vancouver. All of them are striving to reach their best form, their coaches are pushing them all the way, and all of us at the British Olympic Association (BOA) are doing everything we can to make these Games a success for Team GB.

With this weekend's "1,000 Days To Go" milestone making the headlines, some people might feel London 2012 is a long way off but, for me, 1,000 days seems incredibly close. At the same time, it still only feels like yesterday when I was competing at Beijing 2008.

There is nothing quite like watching live world class sporting action.

This afternoon I will be lucky enough to witness British Olympic champions battle it out with other international stars, in front of a capacity audience here at the Manchester Velodrome in the first round of the UCI Track Cycling World Cup.

James Clarke, senior vice-president of the World Sport Group, was asked an interesting question at this week’s inaugural Global Sports Industry Congress in London.
 

Having set up the exclusive internet televising of the last Asian Youth Games, did he think that this method of publicising a sports event, a method employed more recently to show the England football team’s World Cup qualifier against Ukraine, was the way of the future? Was this a watershed?

Sixty Charlotte Street represents the new home of British Olympic and Paralympic sport. It is significant, and a great step forward, that we are co-locating with our Paralympic colleagues. The relationship between our two organisations has always been strong.

As I checked my e-mails a little after 8pm on Friday evening I noticed a message in my in-box from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).  As I opened it and read it I realised this innocent looking e-mail was my official notification from the IAAF, from Pierre Weiss, IAAF General Secretary, granting my request for a change in "status". 

In his heyday, he was  the most powerful man in world sport, but in a peculiarly British way.

Lord Burghley, Marquess of Exeter, was President of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), vice-president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and a fierce defender of the amateur code. He had been a world class athlete and Olympic 400 metres hurdles champion.

Jack Warner may be a noxious clown but he has certainly had England’s 2018 World Cup bidders jumping through hoops.

The Fifa vice-president from Trinidad, whose support supposedly is crucial to England’s quest to stage the tournament for the first time since 1966, has never been much if an Anglophile and his jibe that the bid is "lightweight" is par for the particular course he is adopting. But at least it seems to have provoked an overdue revamping of a bid hitherto heading perilously in the same direction as Paris’s abortive attempt to get the 2012 Olympic Games.
 

That didn’t take long: it’s been scarcely a week since Rio emerged triumphant as host-city of the 2016 Olympics, yet already the sports world has moved on emphatically to the next big thing – the race for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
 

With a Leaders in Football conference scheduled for last week in London, this abrupt switch was perhaps on the cards.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge had reasons to be satisfied when he entered the closing reception with his colleagues yesterday in the Tivoli Gardens, ending nine days of the Olympic summit in Copenhagen.
 

Re-elected by an 88-1 majority Rogge can start his last four year term with a strengthened mandate to achieve his political goals.

What do the rugby sevens World Cup, tennis’s Sony Ericsson Championships and football’s Club World Cup have in common?
 

Right, all were – or are about to be – staged this year in the Middle East. Add to the list the Dubai World Cup, two Formula One grands prix and the European Tour’s season-ending golf championship and you get a sense of how important a venue for elite sport this politically sensitive but hydrocarbon-rich region has become.
 

On Tuesday last week, I joined 47 athletes from 47 different Olympic and Paralympic sports and disciplines, at the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, to celebrate the announcement of Visa as the presenting partner of Team 2012.

To say that I was excited to be there would be an understatement. The creation of Team 2012 as an effective way of raising much needed private funds for Olympic and Paralympic sport, to complement the record public investment that has been made, has not been easy.

Throughout history great political, technological or artistic movement has come out of periods of great adversity. The United Nations from World War Two, satellite technology from the Cold War, great jazz from the Great Depression.
 

But in that adversity lies opportunity. The Olympic Movement has a once in a generation opportunity, I would say a responsibility, to better define and imbed its timeless values.
 

Friday’s vote to select Rio de Janeiro as the first South American Olympic host city opened a new chapter for the Movement.
 

But it also marked the end of an era.