Alarm bells ring over Bach to the future plot

There was some fun Olympics news this week with the announcement of new sports, among them cricket and squash, joining the roster in Los Angeles in 2028.

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There was also a distinctively less uplifting development from inside the interlocking rings, namely the dark rumours that Thomas Bach could go on as International Olympic Committee president beyond the 12-year maximum currently in place - a rule he himself helped to write.

Some "concerned" IOC members from Latin America and Africa asked him to do so at the organisation's annual congress in Mumbai.

They feel, apparently, that an election campaign ahead of next summer's Paris Games would be "disrupting" to the preparations.

Presumably in the same way as democratic mandates tend to be for power-crazed autocrats desperate to stay beyond their due date.

The set-up for this piece of banana republic governance was convenient.

Someone else pleading for Bach to rip up the rulebook for his own benefit. The president, an innocent in all this, of course, was then able to declare his loyalty to the Olympic Charter and observe that time limits make “a lot of sense”.