By Mike Rowbottom

This month's announcement that Katherine Endacott (pictured below), the Commonwealth 100 metre silver medallist and sprint relay gold medallist from Delhi 2010, would be joining Britain's bobsleigh team came just a day after similar news from the German bobsleigh camp.

The team boasting Sandra Kiriasis, the 2006 Olympic champion and triple world champion, had taken on former shot putter Petra Lammert, the 2009 European indoor champion and former European under-23 champion.

These former track and field athletes have both been recruited to perform the role of brake woman, employing their explosive power to get the bobsled off to a flying start.

By Tom Degun in Glasgow

The rise of American David Grevemberg to chief executive of the Glasgow 2014 Organising Committee has been little short of meteoric.

For those in the sporting world, it is no great surprise to see the talented 38-year-old from New Orleans spearheading the plans for the biggest sporting event in Scottish history but it was actually a very unusual path that took him to the position in which he now sits.

Born the eldest of five children, Grevemberg was a hugely talented young sportsman to the point where he became a United States Olympic team contender as a college wrestler.

By Tom Degun

Baku is a city full of contrasts.

The centre of the Azerbaijan capital is a quite wonderful, metropolitan area complete with designer shops, top restaurants, visitor attractions and the general atmospheric buzz that you would expect from Eastern Europe's fastest emerging area.

Well, Eastern Europe or Western Asia as Azerbaijan lies on the border between the two.

By Mike Rowbottom

So now we know. Kenenisa Bekele is back.

Well, we say back. The small but perfectly formed Ethiopian is  back to being the fastest in the world, after almost two years out with injury, although the time of 26min 43.16sec he ran in the Samsung Diamond League meeting in Brussels last week is almost half a minute off the world record he set on the same track six years ago - 26:17.53. Scary territory.

Paula Radcliffe's world marathon record of 2hr 15min 25sec, set on the roads of London two years before Bekele established his best mark, is also scary territory, being more than three minutes faster than any woman has ever managed for the distance.

By Mike Rowbottom in Daegu

One of best things about Dai Greene winning here in Daegu was it meant Malcolm Arnold winning too.

And typically, the coach acknowledged the Welshman's achievement without undue fuss.

"Malcolm gave me a thumbs up from the stands – but from where I was it could have been anything," Greene reported with a laugh after completing a ruthless progress from fourth to first in the final 150 metres of the 400 metres hurdles final, beating the 2009 World silver medallist Javier Coulson on the run in after clearing the last barrier behind him. "He will probably nit-pick a few things."

By Mike Rowbottom

As multiple Paralympic champion Oscar Pistorius, named in the South African team for the IAAF World Championships starting in Daegu later this month, prepares to race against able-bodied athletes for the first time in a championship setting, a fellow South African sports scientist is insisting, regretfully, that he should not be allowed to do so.

Dr Ross Tucker, a senior lecturer with the University of Cape Town's Exercise Science and Sports Medicine Department, has offered insidethegames a new analysis of the Court of Arbitration for Sport's (CAS) decision in May 2008 to allow Pistorius to compete against able-bodied runners, something he says was "a complete farce".

Tucker also feels that Pistorius, who runs on carbon fibre blades known as Cheetahs, is benefiting from technological advances similar to those in Formula One motor racing.

By Andrew Warshaw in Rio de Janeiro

Rio 2016 is today celebrating arguably its most important landmark since being awarded the games two years ago, with a special presentation marking exactly five years to the day to the opening of the first summer Games to be held in South America.

Some 300 Olympic, civic and commercial movers and shakers will convene in downtown Rio de Janeiro for an occasion that will inject a much-needed feel good factor after weeks of negative publicity over the staging of the World Cup two years earlier.

Sebastian Coe was never one for complacency. He will cheerily tell of the moment soon after returning from Beijing when he was invited to lead a lap of honour of returning Olympians around the pitch at a Chelsea home game. As he paraded past The Shed end the crowd burst into an impromptu chorus of "There's only one Steve Ovett."

Those of us who have known him from lad to lordship will attest that counting chickens has never been one of his characteristics which is why exactly one calendar year from next Wednesday, when the lights go up on the most ambitious sporting extravaganza ever staged in Britain, the biggest sigh of relief in the royal box will be emitted from the lips of Baron Coe of Ranmore.

The man who has galvanised London's efforts from winning the bid in Singapore six years ago this month to sanguine fruition 372 days from now says he cannot wait for twelve minutes past eight (20.12 precisely on the clock -geddit?) on Friday 27 July 2012 (it's a leap year remember) when the new Olympic Stadium in Stratford will be the world's centrefold.

By Mike Rowbottom

Normally, the grounds of Lilleshall's high performance centre in Shropshire are tranquil. It was to this remote location, where ornamental gardens lie within gazing distance of what once served as the Duke of Sutherland's hunting lodge, that Sir Alf chose to bring his merry men as he prepared them to win the 1966 World Cup, anxious that they should not be within reach of any establishments likely to make them - even remotely - merry while in training.

So the news that some of the few neighbours this sporting enclave enjoys have been complaining about noise comes as a surprise. But complaints there have been - about shouting, cheering, jeering. In short, complaints about a raucous crowd.

Alison Williamson, five-times an Olympian in Britain's colours, confesses: it's the fault of herself and her fellow archers.

By Mike Rowbottom

Pressure is an inescapable, perhaps even an essential, part of sport. So here is what the England women's hockey team have been contending with at the Champions Trophy in Amsterdam.

The event involves the eight leading nations - so no easy matches here - and the onus was on England to finish in the top five, thus ensuring automatic selection for next year's event, which would provide an invaluable final warm-up for that other big event which comes around a little less often. The Olympic Games.

But, just as Britain did overall by winning so many medals at the Beijing Games, the England women raised the bar for themselves by finishing third in the last Champions Trophy. So despite having also finished third in the World Cup - having gone out of the semi-final on penalties - and at the Commonwealth Games, there was still a sense that they might have to do the same again to show it was not "a flash in the pan."

By David Owen

Andy Hunt gives short shrift to those who think the British Olympic Association (BOA) is riding for a fall.

"That is absolute rubbish," the BOA chief executive says of those who point to the organisation's sale of future ticket rights and worry that it may be storing up trouble for itself post-2012.

"As far as I am concerned, that's absolute rubbish," he goes on.

By Tom Degun

Later this month, those of you lucky enough to have secured tickets to the London 2012 Olympic Games will be informed that you have been successful in the random ballot that decides who the precious pieces of paper go to.

Undoubtedly the most sought after tickets will be for the men's 100 metre sprint final where fans are desperate to see the seemingly inevitable Olympic Stadium showdown between reigning champion Usain Bolt and American Tyson Gay who is perhaps the only man who can stop the Jamaican superstar stealing the show at London 2012 as he did in Beijing at the Bird's Nest Stadium in 2008.

But it is not just these two great stars who people will desperately be hoping to see.

Britain has an outstanding sporting distinction looming on the horizon – that of hosting the Commonwealth Games immediately after an Olympics.

And all those involved in the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow are proceeding in the expectation that it will benefit from the huge surge of energy and interest the London 2012 Games engenders.

It is not quite a unique opportunity - one other nation experienced this particular sporting double when Canada staged the 1978 Commonwealths - the first to bear the current name of "Commonwealth Games"- in Edmonton two years after the Montreal Olympics.

By Mike Rowbottom

Any competitor preparing for anything at the Lilleshall National Sports Centre - home of, among others, the Grand National Archery GB and the British Gymnastics Association – is in an environment of rich sporting history.

The facility, which has been developed around the monumental 17th Century pile that once served as the Duke of Sutherland's hunting lodge, has played host to manifold sporting ambitions since being officially opened in 1951 by Princess Elizabeth.

It was on the fields of Lilleshall that Sir Alf Ramsey, assisted by Les Cocker and Harold Shepherdson, drilled his charges before their 1966 World Cup victory.

By Mike Rowbottom

It was when she saw her coach, Paul Manning, was laughing, that Laura Trott realised what was about to be confirmed.

As she worked on the rollers, warming down from her training session at the Manchester velodrome which is now at the centre of her world, Manning told her the bracing news – at 18, she was going to make her World Track Championship debut in the omnium event.

The circumstances which led to the announcement, uncomfortably close to the Championships which will get under way on the track at Apeldoorn in the Netherlands on Wednesday (March 23), were unfortunate.