If you watched Sepp Blatter’s press conference last week in Zurich, and if you’re anything like me, you would have cringed at the state of world football administration. Is this the best they can do? I’m not just talking about Blatter here either. There are 25 other people on the FIFA Executive Committee, including Michel Platini, who announced today he is standing to succeed Blatter.

Shortly after Chris Froome had completed his second Tour de France triumph the Sky team boss Sir Dave Brailsford declared: “This is a clean rider. We are a clean team. You can have 100 per cent faith in what we do.”

Much as we were enjoying the sport three days into the Pan American Games, we just felt it needed a story to spark it into life, something really interesting to get our journalistic juices flowing.

At times it’s been like watching London 2012 all over again. Well almost.

I tend to look forward rather than dwell on the past but at this time of year it is impossible not to look back to the summer of 2012. As I go through my final preparations to race back at the former Olympic Stadium at the Sainsbury’s Anniversary Games on Sunday I do think about what the London 2012 Paralympic Games did for me, the fans and the sport.

The battle to remain part of the Eurozone is exacting a terrible price on ordinary people in Greece, the cradle of Olympism.

I am writing this a couple of hours after posting a news story about the ongoing transfer of nationality involving three Jamaican athletes, including Olympic and world medallist Shericka Williams, who now want to compete for Bahrain.

As the spirit of clean sport thrives and many in the sporting community fight the good fight against doping, we can see the ambassadorial role the athlete has as paramount to this most global of issues. One of the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) priorities is to provide athletes of the world with better tools to protect the integrity of their sport, allowing them and their fellow athletes to compete on a level playing field.

With just 10 days left to go, the Host City race for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games is shaping up to be one of the most exciting and important in recent decades. Dramatic changes that have unfolded within the Olympic Movement since the beginning of the bidding process have had major implications on the race, and look to be a major factor in determining which city emerges victorious in Kuala Lumpur on July 31.

With the possible exception of a flurry of breaking doping scandals, such as we have been reporting on this afternoon, my favourite thing about multi-sport Games is the opportunity to get to grips with unfamiliar sports and events. 

Working through the four confirmed positive drug tests at the Pan American Games in Toronto last week, the ugly side of the Tour de France was also rearing its head as the now traditional doping controversy begun to gather pace. 

Surveying Tokyo from the top of the Roppongi Hills tower (the one with the sinister, scary spider statue outside the front door), the National Stadium site looks like a big hole in the cityscape near the Swallows baseball stadium.

This week’s dead heat in the Pan American Games rowing final, where Chile and Argentina shared the Men’s Coxless Pairs title in Toronto with identical times of 6min 27.77sec  caused quite a stir.