The coronavirus and its impact will surely be the subject of study across many disciplines for years to come, but for sport and the United Kingdom Government’s agenda to get the nation active there may already be some interesting insights.

The impact of COVID-19 on the sports industry is difficult to predict, not least because such an impact depends almost wholly on when society returns to "normal" and what that "normal" will look like.

This week half a century ago, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) met in Amsterdam.

A reluctance from the vast majority of International Olympic Committee (IOC) members to engage with the media in any way is the source of long-running frustration among the Olympic press corps.

It has not taken long for the coronavirus pandemic to split Summer Olympic international sports federations (IFs) into two groups: the "haves" and the "have-nots". 

When sport returns to what now will be eternally known as the new normal, it is inevitable that it will have a radically different look about it. Whether the changed face of sport will be acceptable is a matter for some conjecture for it is likely to see the survival of the richest rather than the strongest.

Apart from halting most sport, the lockdown so widely applied amidst the current COVID-19 pandemic has also changed it profoundly. Suddenly all sport is nostalgic.

The collapse of the sporting calendar has placed an even larger focus on International Federations, as they seek to chart a path for their sports to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic with as limited damage as possible.

The Olympic Games has become a magnificent, mega-contradiction: humanity’s global festival embracing every nation and race, great or small, gathering both the elite and humble in a social village without barriers, yet simultaneously a grotesque economic and extravagant self-indulgence, stretching host cities to breaking point in staging 33 concurrent World Championships.

Forty years ago, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Lord Killanin was only a few weeks from retirement, but he found himself at the centre of a bitter Olympic crisis as the campaign to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics raged around him.

The coronavirus pandemic has sparked an unprecedented crisis for sport, but it has equally provided those that govern it with a valuable opportunity.

Over the course of this month, I seem, much to my surprise, to have embarked on an exciting new life as a lockdown sports impresario.

Thankfully the days are long gone when old boxers retired to Palookaville along with their slurred speech, twisted noses and fading memories. Advances in safety measures and medical science mean that the fight game is no longer a repository for washed-up pugs. Indeed, as I have mentioned before, these days you will see more rugby players with cauliflower ears than boxers.

Eight years ago, shortly before London 2012, the former British Olympic sculler Ken Dwan described to me what it was like trying to practise in the rarified air at the Mexico City rowing course before competing at the 1968 Games.