For the first time it can be revealed in detail how much cash the IOC paid to an Olympic host. Investigative journalist Jens Weinreich publishes the list of 117 payments to Rio 2016 in a worldwide exclusive in his magazine SPORT & POLITICS. The revelation helps to understand one of the most fundamental questions around the Olympic movement these days: What kind of contribution can Tokyo 2020 really expect from the IOC?

IOC President Thomas Bach made it very clear in his New Year’s speech that politics should be kept out of the Olympics to protect the event’s neutrality. However, it is a paradox that IOC’s characterisation of politicisation only seems to apply to athletes and not the host nations, writes Play the Game’s analyst Stanis Elsborg.

The upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo has raised questions about national identity and belonging among the Japanese population. Especially tennis player Naomi Osaka, who is daughter of a Japanese mother and a Haitian father, has been subject to some surviving racism in Japan, Asger Røjle Christensen reports from the Japanese capital.

One year before the opening of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo there is considerable resistance to the so-called ‘Reconstruction Games’ in Japan that critics fear will remove focus from the Fukushima disaster and undermine democratic values.

While the recently initiated French investigtion into Japanese Olympic head Tsunekazu Takeda and his alleged corruption is unlikely to affect the Games themselves, it has not reflected well on Takeda.

Tsunekazu Takeda, president of the Japan Olympic Committee and chair of the IOC marketing commission is being investigated for ‘active corruption’, media reports.

Artificial intelligence is gaining momentum in sports science and in society as a whole. At a recent conference in Tokyo, researchers and experts discussed how the Olympic Games in Tokyo will put to the test innovative ways of hosting a mega-sporting event.

By 2016, the cost of preparing the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games had almost quadrupled the initial budget. But then, Tokyo got a new governor.