China’s Olympic Games performance took the world by storm, but it gets mixed reviews in a report issued today on official treatment of overseas journalists and media covering the Games.

Cristiana Perez, wife of alleged doping doctor Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, claims that Spain owes much of its gold medal glory at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics to the work of her husband.

The International Cycling Union (UCI) is facing allegations that it accepted a payment of USD 3 million to endorse the place of the ‘keirin’ as one of cycling’s Olympic events, a claim the world governing body for cycling vehemently denies.

Via www.playthegameforopenjournalism.org the International Federation of Journalists and the world communication conference Play the Game launch a helpline and a website to support thousands of foreign journalists in Beijing.

This summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing is being bushwhacked by politics as demonstrators use every chance to hijack the world’s biggest sporting event and highlight problems in Tibet. Many demonstrators would like to see Tibet participate in Beijing and the next Olympics in London in 2012 looks likely to get tied up in another political wrangle

South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee, has successfully appealed against a ban imposed upon him by the International Association of Athletics Federations. The Court of Arbitration for Sport has ruled that there was insufficient scientific evidence available to ban Pistorius’s ‘Cheetah blades’ as technical aids, meaning he is eligible to compete against able-bodied athletes. However, his admission has stoked debate in paralympic sport over the appropriateness of Pistorius’s participation at the Olympics.

The Indian Hockey Federation has been suspended by the Indian Olympic Association after allegations surfaced that the federation’s general secretary, Kandaswamy Jothikumaran, accepted a bribe to select a certain player for the national team.

Already, the forthcoming Olympic Games have become a media event without parallel, though probably not in the way the organisers had envisaged. Across the world, a discussion is now rolling on the relationship between sport and politics, between China and the West, and between gala ceremonies and human rights.