Olympics/Paralympics

Please excuse me for not blogging sooner but it's been an incredibly busy month of travel, racing, organising myself and training! I've just completed another block of races, three in three weeks this time - one in Paris and two in America.

My first race in Paris (Beauvais) went very well. I finished third behind Alistair Brownlee and Javier Gomez in a tight sprint finish after racing together the whole way. I was especially happy with my swim coming out of the water for once right with the leaders, something I have been working hard on.

A couple of days later I travelled out to America, my first stop being in Washington DC to compete in the third World Championship Series event. The Americans always put on a great show and what an incredible venue for a triathlon! The race course took in all the world famous monuments and memorials.

On July 27, it will be exactly three years to go before the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

As I've reported regularly, progress on the Olympic site is racing ahead and few people in the Olympic world are seriously worried that London won't be ready for the Games.

But some believe the cost of the Games - £9.3 billion - is too high in the middle of a recession.

At BBC London, we are interested to know what you think about the Games as we edge closer to the event.

Long-haul economy flights on a hangover; the music of Damien Rice; interminable chats with your partner about where your relationship is heading while you are in the pub trying to watch the Lions in a crucial Test match.

To the list of things that combine boredom and dismay in equal measure can be added a new one: aqua-jogging your way to a one-hour decathlon.

It wasn't meant to be like this. The slope was already steep enough as it was - learning nine new events from scratch in just over three months, bolting a 1500m on the end and trying to do it all in the sort of time that Terry Griffiths used to take sizing up a single safety shot.

That was before last week's hamstring horror while training with Dean Macey. Unsurprisingly, if there's one thing that makes decathlon training even harder than normal, it's having an injury that prevents you from running, jumping and throwing. Trouble.

It was Olympic Day on Tuesday.

What do you mean you missed it? It's a "unique, global event held every year" to commemorate the first time the International Olympic Committee (IOC) met for champagne and cigars. And it's "the most celebrated Olympic event after the Games".

It is also exactly the kind of self-reverential mythologizing the rest of the sporting universe finds so irritating about the Olympics. Does the IOC really need a next "most celebrated Olympic event"?

No, of course it doesn't. The Games are big enough to speak for themselves, which is why I went along to Waltham Forest Town Hall a couple of weeks ago to hear how London 2012's architects are selling the project to cynical Londoners. If it's possible to have a fascinating meeting on council premises this was it.

Anybody know an indoor venue which 2012 can use for boxing?

Olympic bosses are still struggling to persuade the sport to move away from the Excel complex in east London and move to Wembley.

2012 need boxing to switch venues because they have ditched a plan to build a temporary arena near the 02 at Greenwich to save money and are playing chess with some of the sports.

But people in boxing,like badminton which was offered the same deal,don't fancy the long journey from the Olympic village at Stratford to north London.

If you wanted to know what sports politics is like then the place to be on Wednesday was the Olympic Museum in Lausanne.

The museum may be dedicated to the exploits of some of the greatest sportsmen the world has ever seen but on Wednesday this was more like Blackpool or Brighton during the party conference season. Except that is for its setting by the glistening Lake Leman, with the Alps across the water. Far more bewitching than anything Blackpool or Brighton can provide, and the whole event demonstrated that even in these recessionary times the Olympics remain a great draw. So much so that many of the world's top cities, for all their economic problems, are spending millions to get the 2016 Games.

At the Olympic Museum wherever you turned there were sports administrators playing politicians and not a few real-life politicians taking time off from coping with the recession to show their mastery of sports.

The International Olympic Committee is feeling the pain of the recession, having lost $30m, about 4% of its assets, but president Jacques Rogge insists the Olympic movement will not suffer.

Nevertheless, the impact of the worldwide economic downturn may explain why the IOC is changing one of the major planks of its policy and allowing pay channels the opportunity to bid for the right to screen the Summer and Winter Games from 2014 onwards.

Frankie Dunn, Clint Eastwood's character in Million Dollar Baby, has a quick answer every time Hilary Swank's Maggie Fitzgerald asks him to train her to box: "I don't train girls."

This dismissal is delivered in a 60-a-day growl that does nothing to hide his distaste for the idea of women's boxing.

For five minutes last week I felt something similar myself.

I had just walked into the Amateur Boxing Association of England's (ABAE) 2009 Women's Championships and two young fighters were in the ring, slugging it out, in front of a vociferous crowd.

This is the extraordinary story of a sportsman betrayed by his closest friend, of a life destroyed by someone else's cheating and deceit and of a sport struggling to cope with the aftermath of a doping explosion.

Tyree Washington could have been an athletics superstar. He should have gold medals galore, world records, sponsorship deals and a healthy bank balance.

He should have, but he doesn't. And none of it is his fault.

Olympic officials in suits meeting behind closed doors can never generate the sort of excitement as a single tweak of a Usain Bolt muscle, but keep an eye on the meetings beginning on Monday in Lausanne.

While they will not produce any binding decisions they could tell us a lot about the likely shape of the movement over the next decade, including the chances of a first British member of the IOC executive board since the 1950s.

The most crucial meeting is the one on Wednesday when the four cities bidding for the 2016 Games - Rio, Chicago, Tokyo and Madrid - make closed door presentations to IOC members at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne.

The Government and 2012 are always telling us that the whole of Britain will benefit from the Olympics because there will be pre-Games training camps for international teams across the UK.

But there are no guarantees this will happen across the country. I've been in the Calais region this week and the French are working very hard to attract teams too.

And why not? Calais is just an hour by train from central London and I visited excellent failicites for gymnastics, canoeing, basketball and handball. Dominique Dupilet, the head of the Pas-de Calais council, says he's already signed deals with around 10 teams already.

Scientists say the human brain is incapable of accurately remembering the sensation of intense pain. It's something to do with protecting ourselves, with allowing us to move on from traumatic situations.

I have great respect for scientists. Yet none of them, clearly, has ever done a three-hour training session with Daley Thompson.

There is no forgetting. There never will be. I am more likely to forget my own name than I am to lose the memory of what went on at the Millennium Stadium in Battersea Park last Saturday.

In retrospect, the clues were obvious - the glint in Daley's eye, the twitching of the trademark 'tache, the fact that, even aged 51, he looks like he could smash straight through a building's walls if he ever got fed up of using doors.

You can win at Bingo without training. You can fluke a victory in a pub quiz. But two Olympic golds, the world title, the European Championships, three Commonwealth golds and four world records, in the hardest sport of all?

There are no shortcuts. There is no luck. There is only brute effort, suffering and sweat.