Today it was announced that Play the Game will receive the Gerlev Award 2008 next Saturday 4 October when the academy celebrates its own 70th anniversary and the 30th anniversary of the award.

Play the Game, the world communication conference on sport and society, will travel to the UK for the first time. Coventry is to be the first ever city outside of the Nordic countries to host the conference, which has been running for the last eleven years. The conference, taking place 8-12 June 2009, is to be co-organised by Coventry University’s Centre for the International Business of Sport (CIBS).

Play the Game has added articles by Georg Facius, who has held high-level positions within both European and World Athletics, and Julian Summerhayes, a UK-based lawyer, to the Play the Game Knowledge Bank.

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.

Organisers of the unique international Magglingen Conference on Sport and Development have been forced to cancel the event after its key funder has pulled out. Director of Play the Game, Jens Sejer Andersen, calls it a major setback and encourages  international sports federations to come up with new funding as proof of their commitment to sport and development.

Together with International Sport and Culture Association (ISCA) Play the Game has given its full support on cooperation with World Outgames 2009, a sports, culture and human rights event to be held in Copenhagen from July 25 to 2 August 2009.

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.

On Monday 7 April, Play the Game lost a close friend and collaborator, while sport for all lost one of its most important eyewitnesses. After a long struggle with cancer, Danish press photographer Niels Nyholm died at the age of 62.