Olympics/Paralympics

Thursday's Heroes Parade in London offers us the chance to try out some new technology, and you can get involved.

If you're going to be there to see our Olympians and Paralympians, you can add your photos of the day to our interactive map of the parade.

If you're not going, you can use the map to follow instant photo and text updates from points along the route.

All good things must come to an end.

If you're in the UK you will hopefully have enjoyed the ability to watch live, streaming coverage of the Olympics and Paralympics over the past month.

Alongside live coverage, the BBC Sport website has offered hundreds of highlights sequences covering every sport, available on demand.

But on Tuesday 23 September the magic evaporates - the videos will all disappear. You have just a few days left to gorge yourselves on the very best of Beijing.

Tim Brabants is a big fan of any kayak, not just the kind in which he wins Olympic gold.

The world and Olympic kayak single 1000m champion also enjoys a spot of sea kayaking off the South African coast.

"I love going out on the sea. If you've got the skills and the fitness, you can enjoy it and mess around, and learn new skills," he says. "Like shark evading."

We have had hockey players with lions as training partners before, but kayakers racing sharks is a new one.

On Monday we brought you our final 10 British athletes to watch in Beijing. Now it's the turn of international athletes.

You had your say last month on this blog, and there are a few more changes here than in the British line-up.

There is no predicting what will happen at an Olympic Games. But that's no reason not to try.

I've spent a lot of time writing reports about British athletes doing incredibly well in a wide variety of events this year, so when UK Sport announced they'd be happy with 35 medals in Beijing (41 at a push), that seemed almost unambitious to me. Clearly sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe agrees - he wants GB to meet, or exceed that target.

I turned to Luciano Barra, an expert at this kind of thing. As a former head of the Italian Olympic Committee, Barra has spent much of his life immersed in four-year Olympiads.

Having taken a step back in the wake of the 2006 Winter Olympics, Barra devotes his time to maintaining a spreadsheet which pools every single world championship result, in order to estimate the Olympic medal tally. He seemed like a good person to call.

Last month, we produced a shortlist of 10 British athletes and asked you for your thoughts - both on the ones we named, and any other athletes occupying your thoughts ahead of the Beijing Games.

We had a great response, which certainly affected at least one decision on who made it into our final 10 to watch. And now we're publishing full profiles of each of those 10 athletes.

Seen our Monkey video yet?

We're unveiling this two-minute animation on our website, and it will be broadcast across BBC television in the UK just before 1930 BST tonight.

The animation, by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett - the team behind Gorillaz - twists the tale of the classical Chinese novel "Journey to the West", turning it into a "Journey to the East" and the Beijing Olympics.

That journey reaches a climax with this animated sequence, and you can find out more about Monkey and friends on this page. There are image galleries, mobile downloads, cut-out-and-wear masks if you've got little Monkeys, and some facts and figures - which might keep you busy on the web, finding out about the Pipa, Ur Hu and Zheng.

You can also download your own desktop Monkey, an application which brings you the latest news about your favourite Olympic sports, and lets you set reminders for events at the Games you don't want to miss. Monkey - or Pigsy, or Sandy if you prefer - will alert you when your event is about to start.

Monkey will introduce BBC Sport's coverage throughout the Olympics, so watch the video, download him to your desktop, and let me know what you think.

Everything in British modern pentathlon seems to be four years ahead of schedule.

Not only has Team GB crammed the maximum four pentathletes into this year's Olympics - something planned for London, not Beijing - but before 2008's event has even started, BBC Sport's team find ourselves yards from the 2012 pentathlon venue in Greenwich.

Pentathlon's powers-that-be chose Greenwich as the backdrop for the team's final media appearance before they head off to China. It's a wise decision, not least because the Queen's House at the National Maritime Museum, where the press gathering takes place, is a magisterial, imposing setting. Somehow that suits modern pentathlon, on first glance one of the less fathomable Olympic sports.

Every time I write about pentathlon I feel compelled to trawl out the list of all five sports involved - well, I'm bored with that (and pentathlon fans, though few in number, must despair when reporters insist on spelling out the basics for the umpteenth time, like having every football report start with "the match lasted approximately 90 minutes, with 11 men on each team").

If you're not sure then you can find out here but, honestly, you don't even need to know. The only pentathlon knowledge you need, before you sit down to watch it on 21 and 22 August, is that Great Britain's competitors are really good and ought to win a medal in the women's event. Then you can pick up the sports as you go along.

Today we've launched our interactive map of the Beijing Olympics, showing all the venues, a selection of landmarks, plus blogs and Twitter posts from our journalists in Beijing.

If you haven't already seen it, please do take a look and let me know your thoughts.

I'm a bit of a map geek - old maps, new maps, shipping charts, satellite images, GPS, it's all good (I've just had mild abuse involving "toggles" and "anoraks" lobbed at me in the office, to prove the point) - so it's been great fun to help build a map for BBC Sport.

But for somebody like me, used to wasting the occasional evening messing around with applications like Google's My Maps, creating a map on this level turned out to be a daunting proposition.

I can't let Mark Ashenden win so easily with his Dolph Lundgren Olympic interview, so last week I rang up our entertainment team and demanded they find a better celeb, with a better Olympic story. Here goes.

Hulk Hogan against Buvaisar Saitiev. Stone Cold against Khadjimourat Gatsalov. The Rock against Artur Taymazov. Who would win?

Three were stars of professional wrestling, three were wrestling gold medallists at the Athens Olympics. Now I wouldn't be overly keen on meeting Stone Cold down a dark alley on a wet Tuesday night, but amateur wrestling dispenses with a script, lots of fancy lighting and a few lorry-loads of stage make-up, in favour of pure sport.

So it's nice to hear The Rock, otherwise known as pro-wrestler-turned-movie-star Dwayne Johnson, paying tribute to Olympic wrestling.

In exactly one month's time, the Olympics in Beijing will finally get going. Which athletes will you be watching, and why?

If you're British, the answer is usually somebody else who's British.

But with almost 300 Brits competing in Beijing, you might struggle to narrow the list down to 10. That's what we've been trying to do in the office, and I bring you the results of the subsequent, incredibly unscientific, straw poll.

If you're not British or bored with national fervour on the back of Wimbledon and Silverstone, read on to see the international athletes we've picked.

I realise Tom Daley is a bit of a nipper in Olympic terms, at the tender age of 14, but was there any need to give our diving star a cuddly toy for the trip to Beijing?

It turns out that young Tom's new pal is not just any old soft toy lion. No, this is the Team GB lion mascot - or, to give him his current proper title, Team GB Mascot Lion.