"Sports leaders, governments and advertisers have to stop pretending that winning medals will somehow magically “inspire” increased take-up," write Peter Donnelly and Bruce Kidd in this comment piece discussing the effect of Canada's sports funding system.

International sport is facing new power structures, but also a huge task in making sport and physical activity more inclusive. At the closing session of Play the Game 2013, four speakers mapped some of sport’s urgent challenges without reaching a clear consensus on how to assess and deal with them.

Do sport mega-events hold the potential to increase mass participation in sport? Many politicians trying to gain acceptance for a bid to host a major sport event would say yes. But according to two speakers at Play the Game 2013, this theory of a trickle-down effect is very dubious.

Sport England’s newest survey on sport and active recreation in the UK shows a fall in regular sports participation of 220,000 in the past year, the number of active +26-year-olds has dropped by 280,000.

At UNESCO’s international conference of sports ministers in Berlin there was wide agreement on the need to strengthen the global action against match-fixing and other types of corruption in sport. But the Berlin Declaration does not commit any actors to concrete action.

A new report from the Danish Institute for Sports Studies on sports participation in Denmark shows a steady growth in the participation rate for both adults and children.

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

Play the Game and the Danish Institute for Sports Studies can now reveal the title and themes for this year’s Play the Game conference, taking place in Aarhus, Denmark from 28-31 October 2013.