One of the things that struck me over the course of last year about the many issues we face in sports governance, and which gave me cause for reflection during the festive season when I spent some quality time with my family, is the high incidence of nepotism at the highest levels of sport.

You don’t have to cast your mind too far back in the past to remember a period when corruption and scandal were as synonymous with cricket as the words bat and ball.

Are we fighting a losing battle trying to stop athletes taking performance enhancing drugs? Is cheating just so much a part of “our” collective genetic makeup that it can never be eradicated from sport? Is the only option to throw more money at it, and make the offenders criminals and put them in prison, or is there an alternative, albeit extreme option?

As the athletics and wider sporting worlds prepare for today’s release in Munich of the “wow factor” report - the second part of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Independent Commission investigation, as trailed by its chairman Richard Pound - debate over what to do about dubious track and field records has intensified. 

In his forty-odd years in the media spotlight, I am not aware that David Bowie gave the smallest sign of any particular fondness for sport.

Anthony Joshua, the new British and Commonwealth heavyweight champion, says his successor in the GB team, big Joe Joyce, can replicate his own 2012 triumph by winning gold in the Rio Olympics this summer.

I was struck by a comment by cycling drugs cheat turned anti-doping crusader David Millar during another week of upheaval in sport.

Warm and respectful greetings to all members of the world’s weightlifting family: athletes, coaches, Federation officials, the media and the all-important fans of weightlifting.

A quiet start to the New Year? The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and FIFA are having none of it.

As we head into a New Year and ever closer to Rio 2016, every athlete will be focused on achieving medal success in Brazil. 

Double Olympic bobsleigh champion Kaillie Humphries will this weekend become the latest in a not-so-long line of sportswomen challenging their male counterparts on equal terms, as she pilots three other female members of the Canadian team at the World Cup event in Lake Placid.

With Bahrain’s Shaikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa now quoted at odds of as short as 5/6 to become the next FIFA President next month, we need to take seriously what he has to say.

Anyone wishing Amir Khan a Happy New Year is risking a right-hander from the normally amiable boxer from Bolton who won a nation’s heart in Athens back in 2004 when, as a 17-year-old, he fought a solo battle for Britain in the Olympics, losing only to the Cuban Mario Kindelan, then the world's finest amateur, in the final.

Last year proved a difficult one for the Olympic Movement, with the challenge of sustaining interest in bidding for major events hardly helped by scandals in FIFA and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which together form the biggest threat to the running of global sport in generations.