Two bitterly opposed combatants. Their rivalry played out in front of a huge television audience. An outcome too close to call. Both wealthy beyond the imagination of their followers. Winning is all that matters. One cool, calm & collected. The other rattled, emotional and shooting from the hip. One claiming the system is rigged against him and that even his own team are sabotaging his campaign. The other silently taking the moral high-ground. The underdog, snubbing one press conference after another and resorting to social media to make his ‘disrespected’ point. Perhaps the elderly Bernie holds the key?

In answer to the TUE (Therapeutic Use Exemptions) revelations of the last couple of weeks, Sir Bradley deemed to give journalist pal, William Fothergill, an ‘access-all-areas’ interview in this weekend’s Guardian. By all means do have a read if you’re interested on finding out more concerning the grey areas of drug use professional teams operate within, but I suspect, like me, you’ll be left a tad nonplussed by his range of reasons and excuses.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a scathing piece condemning the state-sponsored approach towards systematic doping taken by the Russian Olympics & Paralympics Federations and contrasting it with that of our own. Broadly speaking, my argument was based upon our two very different, but somehow strangely similar, approaches to the quest for international sporting recognition: ours was to spank the cash, there’s was to inject the dope. However, as it’s recently transpired, perhaps our two systems are even more similar than I alluded to.

Whilst waiting for the swimming pool to open, my conspiracy-theorist pal asked whether I had seen the helmet-cam-cycling footage of future national-treasure, Jeremy Vine? Obviously, not being part of today’s social media revolution I hadn’t, so he very kindly downloaded it onto his picture-phone. WTF.