The threshold is a clear one, between marble tiles and parquet flooring. The door stands ajar, its brass nameplate proclaiming “Salle Greard.” On June 23 1894, Baron Pierre De Coubertin and a group of invited delegates walked in over this threshold deep within the Sorbonne University buildings and, later in the day, out over it. During which time the International Olympic Committee, and the modern Games, were born.

Is it because we are islanders? Or something to do with the residue of empire? Or something else altogether?

As someone weaned on Sir Alf Ramsey and the spirit of 1966 and all that, and who voted Remain, the past few days have not been happy ones. We (at least England that is) are out if Europe in every sense and I believe the nation is poorer for it.

“A week is a long time in politics,” former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is adjudged to have told lobby journalists in the early 1960s. His descendent David Cameron learnt this lesson too well last week after Britain's most tumultuous seven days in generations.

Back in December, I wrote a blog in the aftermath of the 2015 World Weightlifting Championships in Houston commending the sport’s world governing body’s decision to ban 11 Bulgarian weightlifters from competing at Rio 2016 after testing positive for the banned anabolic steroid stanozolol during a training camp for last year’s European Championships in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi.

Supporters of Rome’s bid for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games can be forgiven for feeling more than a little sense of déjà vu this week.

Dear Lord Coe,

When it was announced that the Russian team will be banned from the upcoming Olympics last week, the common reaction here in Russia was denial mixed with anger. Many top athletes and officials continue to deny the scope of the problem and are angry that Russia is being singled out while similar issues exist in many places across the world.

It’s Olympic Day today. It should really be called Olympic Birthday as it commemorates the creation of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on June 23 in 1894.

It has been a hectic 48 hours in the never-ending saga of the international sports movement and the Kremlin.

There’s so much happening in the world of sport, around issues that I care very much about and have been writing and talking about for some time, that it’s hard to know where to start.

There are some occasions when you have to make a choice between two vastly different directions. When you make a decision which, while related to one specific issue, will have wide-ranging repercussions that will be felt for generations to come.

The images of Bern and the European Championships are still very present in our mind and I won’t hide from you the great joy and pride this competition brought me and this for many reasons.

Thank God for Northern Ireland and Iceland. After a week littered with violence between so-called fans, largely involving Russian and English hooligans, the two supposed minnows gave us reason to believe we will remember UEFA Euro 2016 for the football rather than the fighting.

We will discover over the next few days what Thomas Bach really thinks “zero tolerance" on doping should look like.