Dan Roan

It never ceases to amaze me just how quickly things can change in sports news.

This time last year I reflected on the sporting highlight of 2016, the Rio Games, where Britain sealed its status as a true Olympic and Paralympic superpower.

The eyes of the sporting world will be on the International Olympic Committee's headquarters in Lausanne later on Tuesday when President Thomas Bach announces whether he and his board have banned Russia from the 2018 Winter Olympics.

For an Olympic powerhouse nation, the hosts of the next football World Cup no less, to be cast as an international sporting pariah, would be unprecedented.

A row has developed over a 'risk report' that claims there is "an increasing political risk that Qatar may not host the World Cup in 2022".

The study, by management consultants Cornerstone Global, assesses the impact of the current diplomatic crisis between the tiny, gas-rich emirate and its neighbours.

Football Association crises occur with such regularity that they no longer come as any surprise.

From chronically failing England teams and all-too-regular managerial sackings to painfully slow governance reforms and the appalling child sex abuse scandal that erupted last year, the governing body seems to lurch from one controversy to the next, despite being in receipt of tens of millions of pounds of public money, and regular changes of chairmen and chief executives.

Seventeen national anti-doping organisations have demanded Russia is banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Less than five months before the start of the Pyeongchang Games, the group said the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) "refusal to hold Russia accountable for one of the biggest scandals in sports history... imperils clean athletes and the future of the Olympic movement".

Walk around London Stadium, as I did earlier this week, with final preparations being made for athletics' World Championships, and it is impossible not to be taken back to that heady summer five years ago, when track and field - the Olympic movement's flagship sport - provided the most iconic moments of an unforgettable Games.

When the action gets under way on Friday and the world's finest athletes go head to head, London 2017 will of course evoke memories of the London 2012 Olympics, which for many back then, seemed like the best of times for the sport.

Eleven sport governing bodies are demanding an overhaul of the way Britain invests in the pursuit of Olympic and Paralympic medals.

In an unprecedented challenge to elite performance funding agency UK Sport, the group have joined forces to call for an urgent review of what they call "a two-class system that runs counter to Olympic ideals".

England's Under-20 World Cup winners have been a revelation, sparking a fresh debate on youth development.

A 1-0 win over Venezuela in Sunday's final in South Korea gave England their biggest international title since 1966.

Back in September 2013 I interviewed an emotional Thomas Bach in Buenos Aires a few minutes after the German had become the most powerful man in sport.

The newly elected International Olympic Committee (IOC) president confidently told me that after a successful reign by his predecessor Jacques Rogge, the Olympic movement needed mere evolution.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) says it still has "full confidence" in a report into Russian doping despite "discrepancies" in the supporting evidence.

The report claimed more than 1,000 Russians benefitted from a state-sponsored doping programme.