This article is part of a research project about the Danish Landsstævne, the National Sport Festival Bornholm 2002.

A survey of sports journalism in Norway, Denmark and Sweden shows that Scandinavian newspapers' sport coverage is uncritical and one-sided.

How can we describe a press corps that up until 1998 passively hitched a ride on the professional cycling caravan, allowing the riders to lift share values up with them into the mountains?

In the past few years we have many examples where the ideals of sport are being tarnished in ways that suggests sports men and women and the people who work with are under intolerable pressure to deliver success.

Has corruption in the IOC and doping in the Olympics gone too far? Can they be rescued? Or do we walk away and leave them for the gangsters, asks journalist and author Andrew Jennings after investigating the IOC for years.

For the Olympic games at Atlanta in 1996 the total number of writing press and photographers was 5,000. Yes, 5,000... Plus no less than another 10,000 radio and television accredited representatives.

We journalists are acutely conscious of the challenges facing us by multimedia companies and the globalization of especially world television.

Society's watchdog - or showbiz pet is the choice faced by sports reporters and any of us who write about the politics and money of national and international sport.