You might easily have missed it, but 2017 will bring the 50th anniversary of the birth of SportAccord - or the Global Association of International Sports Federations, as we may soon have to get used to calling it.

As you read this, two young figure skaters are training hard on an ice rink. They are in Moscow; they are on the brink of making history.

A week today, in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, something wonderful/dispiriting will take place: the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Cross Country Championships.

Great cycling rivals Anna Meares and Victoria Pendleton will meet again as the countdown to the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games begins in earnest at Buckingham Palace tomorrow.

It was perhaps appropriate that Brazil's first Rio 2016 gold medal last summer was won by a woman who had encountered great adversity en-route to Olympic glory. 

Forty years ago, cricketers past and present were making their way to Melbourne for a special match to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of Test cricket. The match itself was a thrilling spectacle in which Australia beat England by 45 runs, exactly as they had done in the very first such encounter in March 1877.

Budapest are the only one of the three 2024 bidding cities never to have staged an Olympic Games, but a century ago it was all very different. A Hungarian was even at the very forefront of moves to revive the Olympics.

At least one thing is easy right now for Ivo Ferriani, President of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (IBSF) – Königssee.

Rowing, and lightweight rowing in particular, faces a crucial point in its history this week as the sport’s governing body, the International Rowing Federation (FISA), votes on restructuring the Olympic boats programme from the Tokyo 2020 Games onwards.

Is athletics about to experience its Twenty20 moment this week? Or will the new-look Nitro Athletics event that will run for three evenings in Melbourne, starting next Saturday and witnessed by interested parties including the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) President Sebastian Coe prove to be no more than a brief starburst of colourful enterprise?

This year's Karate1 Premier League series, which starts in Paris on Friday (January 27), is "crucial" to the sport’s plans to develop itself before its Olympic debut at the Tokyo 2020 Games, according to the World Karate Federation's (WKF) President Antonio Espinós.

As Donald Trump prepares for his inauguration as the 45th President of the United States, he might just have in mind another Ceremony seven years in the future.

The French men's handball team will start the defence of its world title on home soil this week - but within a relatively unfamiliar sporting landscape altered by big rule changes and the introduction of video technology offering referees unprecedented access and involvement.

The sporting year of 2016 appears, in retrospect, like a dramatic struggle between the forces of light and darkness.

It is fair to say that 2016 has not been a vintage year for sports administrators. Too old, too stuck in the past and too out of touch with the needs and desires of the modern world are among common gripes. And, for all their powerful rhetoric about youth and innovation shown through gestures like adding skateboarding and surfing to the Tokyo 2020 programme, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have been tarred with the same brush.