How eager are governments around the world to make a national sports policy making people more active and meeting some of the most important global threats to sport? This will be tested over the next year as UNESCO asks all countries to discuss a new “International Charter of Physical Education, Physical Activity and Sport”

While parents largely support the element of competition in sport as an educational tool, the vast majority of children are far less enthusiastic, says a new British study among schoolchildren and their parents.

The country that will host two of the world’s largest sports events has no long term strategy for sport.

With kids in sports, parents struggle with two images of reality. Either you see your child – or the children of others – as talented or as hopeless cases. Many parents easily see that a child is talented. What most people mean by talent is that the child can be great when she/he enters adulthood. Children’s talents are thus seen in the context of an adult world.

The first Youth Olympic Games (YOG) in Singapore next year is set to cost at least 25 times more than another sporting event in Finland this summer with a similar amount of competitors.

Sport can stem the rising tide of youth suicides in many countries according to Australian National University's Colin Tatz. In a presentation to the Play the Game conference, he explained that sport opens the doors of social inclusion to those who feel cruelly excluded.