I was standing in the Reuters newsroom where I worked in the then German capital of Bonn, when my former colleague Martin Nesirky filed an urgent story from East Berlin. The old printer it emerged from went into alarm mode.

The story that flashed around the world in seconds had a simple message - East German citizens could now leave the country without a visa.

But what it really meant was that the Berlin Wall had just crashed down before our eyes. It took a few hours before everybody - East German citizens and the guards on the wall particularly - understood what was happening.

For the next weeks and months, I was in the middle of the most exciting story of my life. And, it is often forgotten, that it was a big sporting story too.

I went into East Germany and hunted down the doctors who had been running the GDR's former drug-taking regime. Amazingly, they were very honest about the systematic cheating. In the late autumn of 1989, there was a real sense that East Germans needed to unload the emotional baggage they had been carrying around for decades.

Within hours of the Wall coming down, there was talk of a Berlin Olympic bid and a joint East-West Olympic team. At the time, both ideas seemed years away. But reunification happened within a year and we saw the emergence of a united German team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. The Berlin bid was less successful, largely because the Cold War was over when it went to the International Olympic Committee.

I then reported on a fascinating five years of German sport when the football team won the World Cup in Italy and Germany was a force in a variety of Olympic sports, the mix of east and west German systems.

The country's powerful economy also meant many major championships came to Germany because there were plenty of big-name sponsors ready to back them.

The reason I am writing about this is that I feel Britain could be heading into equally exciting sporting days in the three years to the 2012 Olympics and beyond.

We've just had a great world gymnastics championships in London and the ATP World Tour tennis finals are heading to the 02 Arena this month. This will put the global spotlight on London and on the 02 as one of the key 2012 venues.

The Olympics will mean many more global championships will be taking place in London and Britain in the next few years. There's the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014 and almost certainly, a world athletics championships at the Olympic Park in the five years after 2012.

You could add the possibility of a football World Cup in 2018 but my sources tell me there's going to be a lot of work to do to stop the Spanish and the Russians snatching that tournament away from us.

But even if the World Cup bid fails next year, London and Britain must enjoy this next decade and use these events to inspire kids to take up sport.

And we have to make sure people away from London - in Birmingham, Manchester and Scotland - get a piece of all of the action when the capital has its big days. That means cheap rail tickets, Park and Ride, and travel-ticket deals have to be a big part of the next 10 years.

As a member of our Olympics reporting team and an ice hockey commentator, I'll be in Vancouver (and Whistler) alongside Rob Hodgetts and Anna Thompson, covering the Games for the BBC Sport website.

But the Games won't just emerge out of nothing. The world's top winter sports athletes are already getting stuck into the winter season - there is action all over the place as they cram in training sessions and try to get the kind of results, and confidence, that will see them on to medals in Canada.

Here's a round-up of what's been going on, including links to the best stuff on the BBC and elsewhere, and a look ahead to the coverage we've got coming up.

Solden, in Austria, is almost always the first place to look when the winter sports season gets going. It's the traditional venue for the start of the skiing World Cup circuit.

This year, Solden's men's giant slalom competition was won by Swiss skier Didier Cuche for the men, ahead of American star Ted Ligety, both of whom usually feature near the top of the standings.

Cuche won the 2007 world championship bronze medal in giant slalom, and holds the world title in super-G, another alpine skiing discipline (all of which are explained in our guides). Ligety has the 2009 world bronze to his name, and won Olympic gold in the combined event in Torino in 2006.

In the women's event, Finland's Tanja Poutiainen nipped in ahead of Austrian local favourite Kathrin Zettel to win by a margin of one hundredth of a second. Poutiainen won silver in the giant slalom at the last Olympics, but has never won a world or Olympic title, so it's a great start to her campaign.

However, another Austrian star, Nicole Hosp, tore her knee ligaments and is going to miss the rest of the season. She won the giant slalom world title in 2007, and would have been a medal contender at Vancouver.

The news from Solden wasn't great for Britain's Chemmy Alcott, either. Alcott is GB's only real hope in women's skiing right now, and last month she told Anna she has "the self-belief to win gold", but she also needs results - and finished down in 19th in Solden. Here's Swissinfo's report on proceedings, and the results are here.

The next event is slalom in the Finnish resort of Levi on 14 and 15 November. Check the skiing governing body's full calendar of World Cup events for more. And once you've done that, take a look at Ghana's "snow leopard" Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, who spoke to us last week.

Britain's snowboarders have been in action too. Ben Kilner, a 21-year-old from Banchory in Aberdeenshire, is hoping to reach Vancouver to compete in the half-pipe event, and finished 14th in the sport's second World Cup event of the season in Switzerland.

He didn't reach the final but, in his own words, "the result keeps me on track for Vancouver so I'm really pleased with that". Next up is the third round on 6 and 7 January 2010 in Kreischberg, Austria. There's more on the SnowsportsGB website, and Kilner was in London not so long ago, showing off at Battersea power station. We spent a bit of time speaking to him here.

Britain's Ben Kilner - a snowboarding powerhouse in the making?

The hundred-day countdown mark gave the British Olympic Association a cue to voice fears that London 2012 fever might overshadow British achievements in Vancouver.

BOA boss Andy Hunt said: "There's no way that I want winter athletes to ever feel like second-class citizens. They are absolutely fundamental to the Olympic movement, both in Britain and around the world."

Britain's winter sports competitors get roughly 1.5% of the funding available to the summer sports - and usually have to train abroad for their troubles, too. (There being no skeleton run or ski jump in the UK, among other facilities.)

We've heard tales of British winter sports athletes flogging goods from their car boots to make ends meet and pay training costs, and certainly there are others who fund themselves in the absence of official backing.

So novel ways of raising cash are nothing new, but the US speedskating team still raised eyebrows when they got US late-night TV comic Stephen Colbert involved.

Colbert's show is now sponsoring the team - or at least, the show's fans are. The show itself is paying nothing, but will encourage its viewers to donate. The US team say they don't know if they'll get $5 or $500,000.

Is it time for a GB response? Should the next series of X Factor - or perhaps more appropriately, Dancing On Ice - focus on finding winter sports talent, with the phone voting profits going to the athletes? I'm thinking Hole In The Wall On Ice would be appointment-to-view television in our living room.

Britain's skeleton team are one of our best bets for a medal in Vancouver. Shelley Rudman brought home silver in 2006, GB's only medal of the Games, and is heading back into action alongside partner and fellow skeleton star Kristan Bromley this year.

Their first two World Cup events are on 12 and 20 November at the US venues of Park City and Lake Placid respectively. Before they left the country, the BBC went filming with the pair.

Nationality issues are causing consternation in both the British and French camps ahead of the Winter Olympics.

Ice dancers Mark Hanretty and Christine Chitwood have given up on their bid to get into the British team for Vancouver - because as far as organisers are concerned, Christine is still American.

Though she married an Englishman in August, her visa has yet to drop through the letterbox, and it'll be two more years before she can claim UK citizenship. All of which leaves Sochi 2014 as their target.

Remember French athlete Eunice Barber? Initially from Sierra Leone but a French competitor since 1999, Barber (right) is a former world champion in the heptathlon and long jump.

Her next trick was going to be a bid for women's bobsleigh gold in Vancouver, having re-trained to represent France in the event. But it takes two to tango long jump bobsleigh, and Canadian-born Lesa Mayes-Stringer, the only woman capable of driving the French team's sled alongside Barber, has been denied French nationality for a second time.

"There is not much hope left," according to Charles Dumont, technical director of the French winter sports federation, quoted in the Vancouver Sun. "But we will try to mobilize support in political circles."

Finally, keep an ear out for BBC Radio 5 live's next Winter Olympics special, coming up on Thursday, 12 November from 2000 GMT, with Eleanor Oldroyd presenting. I'll pop details of who's appearing on the end of this blog as soon as I know, and the whole thing will be on iPlayer too.

Questions about the Winter Olympics? Want to know more about one of the sports, one of the athletes, or BBC coverage? Leave a comment below and I'll get onto it for you, or you can ask me on Twitter.

Yep, things are moving in Canada. It's now fewer than 100 days to the start of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver and the journey of the Olympic torch has begun.

I should say I love Canada. How can you not be won over by a country with places called Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat?

So I've been keeping an eye on the start of the torch relay both for personal interest and also to monitor how the event is being staged given that London 2012 gets ever closer.

The 106-day cross country relay will end in Vancouver on February 12

The Vancouver flame was lit in the traditional way at Olympia and then travelled around Greece before being handed over in Athens.

It flew to Canada encased in a miner's lantern on board a military plane, and we're told it had a row of seats to itself.

There was a total of 4 flames and 6 lanterns - presumably in case of any unfortunate incidents of extinguishment.

But it landed successfully in the BC capital of Victoria, a place on the edge of the Pacific Ocean which feels like a British town thanks to a grand hotel serving afternoon tea, some well-tended gardens and the statue of Queen Victoria outside the Parliament buildings.

And then the torch began its journey round Canada in what will be the longest domestic relay in Olympic history, ahead of the Games themselves next February.

If you've got time, have a look at the daily highlights log on the Vancouver 2010 website. There's also loads of coverage in the Canadian press.

What leaps out is the pride of a country about to stage the Olympic Games, and also the sheer pleasure of the people selected to carry the flame.

Alongside that is the potential to "play" with the torch: to take it to unusual locations, to devise novel forms of transport and to maintain interest despite what's something of an endurance test.

Ruth Sadler, a 72-year-old who still rides waves off Vancouver Island, hands the flame to surfer Raph Bruhwiler

I know the London organisers are watching the Vancouver experience and are about to start their planning in detail. We too will have a torch handed to us in a stadium in Greece - in the Spring of 2012.

It will be transferred to the UK, by means currently unknown, for its journey around our nations and regions before it lights the Olympic cauldron on July 27th.

I was talking to a colleague about the Canadian experience so far, and he said he thought ours would be significantly different: "we're more cynical and we prefer things understated in a British way."

I'm not sure about cynical, but I am sure about Britishness: it would be bizarre if the UK didn't make this torch journey its own. And that's the opportunity: to take a global symbol in a year the eyes of the world are upon us and to make it part of our national story - just as they're doing in Canada now.

And then I remember they sometimes have to make tough decisions - 50/50 calls that will leave lots of people annoyed no matter which way you call it - and wonder if I really would like that responsibility.

World cycling's bosses are facing one of those lunch-spoiling dilemmas right now and the decision they appear to have made has certainly annoyed a lot of people, many of them British.

But before anybody accuses them of plotting to do us in now that we're good at something we should perhaps try to understand why preventing British cyclists from defending hard-won Olympic titles is not the open-and-shut case of incompetence/insensitivity/anti-British prejudice it might seem at first glance.

Bradley Wiggins' storming ride in Beijing might be the last ever Olympic men's individual pursuit

In Beijing there were 165 men's events and only 127 for women. This meant that 58% of the 11,000 athletes at the Games were male - the inequality is even worse at the Winter Olympics.

This is more than just a bit embarrassing for a movement that considers itself liberal and meritocratic, it also falls short of the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) own charter and could even be illegal in many countries (particularly when you consider the public money involved in staging these celebrations of humanity).

Simple, you might be thinking, just introduce more events for the women, 165 gold-medal opportunities each.

If only it was that easy.

Leaving aside any debate on the attraction of women's Greco-Roman wrestling or men's synchronised swimming, there is one massive problem with adding events to the Olympic programme: cost. More events, means more athletes, more coaches, more officials, more rooms, more vehicles, more, more, more.

The price tag of an Olympics is already at the upper end of what most governments think they can reasonably expect their electorates to go for and the IOC knows it. Asking for more is out of the question. So if the federations that run the Olympic sports want new events they're going to have to give up some old ones.

Which brings us to track cycling: Beijing's Laoshan Velodrome was a fantastic venue for top sport, and the scene of many of Team GB's proudest moments, but it was hardly an equal-opportunities workplace.

Of the 10 events, only three were for female cyclists. While this meant Sir Chris Hoy was able to sprint to three golds and a knighthood, Victoria Pendleton had to make do with one and some magazine work.

This disgraceful situation left cycling's governing body, the UCI, open to considerable criticism. And it certainly came, much of it from Britain. But say what you like about the UCI, and many do, nobody can say it didn't listen.

At London 2012, it has decreed, there will be five events for men and five for women: sprint, team sprint, keirin, team pursuit and omnium. So out go the men's madison and points races, the women's points and both individual pursuits, and in comes a women's team sprint, keirin, team pursuit and two omniums.

Those changes are provisional but nobody is expecting the IOC to do anything other than rubber-stamp them at its next board meeting in December.

So, with one bureaucratic flourish, equality between the sexes has been delivered in the velodrome. But what about equality between the cyclists?

The five chosen events can be broken down into three for sprinters like Hoy and Pendleton, one for distance riders like Bradley Wiggins and Rebecca Romero, and one, the five-discipline omnium, for all-rounders. These choices represent a clear shift away from endurance events to more explosive ones, and reaction has divided along those lines (as the video below demonstrates).

Pendleton, unsurprisingly, is delighted. Sprint king Hoy is pleased for his female counterparts but acknowledges it is hard on the distance riders. Romero and Wiggins, individual pursuit specialists, are furious. The former described the changes as "ludicrous", while the latter said the proposals would "kill off" endurance cycling on the track.

Wiggins, a three-time world and double Olympic champion, was hoping to go for an unprecedented third straight victory in his home city in 2012, and Romero will also now be deprived of the chance to defend her Olympic title. If that's not bad enough, Wiggo has also lost his ride in the madison and Romero her second medal shot in the points race.

And it's not just these two in the GB team left wondering if they have upset the cycling gods. Beijing medallists like Steven Burke, Wendy Houvenaghel and Geraint Thomas can all feel aggrieved about the UCI's "radical" tinkering.

But the link between the individual pursuit and Britain goes deeper than that. Domestic riders have won 21 world titles in the event in the last half century. The greats of British track cycling - Beryl Burton, Graeme Obree, Hugh Porter et al - have specialised in this most pure of contests.

And you could argue that Chris Boardman's individual pursuit triumph in 1992 was the catalyst for Britain's recent Olympic renaissance. The lessons learned by Boardman and his young coach Peter Keen have transformed Team GB from being nice-but-nowhere types to success-hungry medal machines.

So it is more than just another event for British cyclists and while none of them disputes the need to address the male/female medal split, they are wondering if other sports would have been given such a firm one-in/one-out ultimatum.

Athletics, the Olympics' biggest sport, has been allowed to level up its medal split without losing men's events, and swimming, the second biggest sport, has also not had to engage in much horse-trading with the IOC over the years. Are some Olympic sports more equal than others? That, no doubt, will be the topic of much conversation when the track cycling community gathers in Manchester this weekend for the World Cup Series' opening leg.

I expect there will be also be some water-cooler chat about the omnium, which isn't on the World Cup menu but has appeared at the last few world championships. Until now cycling's answer to the pentathlon has failed to tempt the sport's biggest names (Thomas refers to it as a "joke event" in the video above) but that will probably change now there is an Olympic medal to aim for. One rider who appears made for its jack-of-all-trades demands is Britain's Lizzie Armitstead. Remember the name.

It is also worth pointing out that British cycling has been here before. Hoy was devastated when the UCI took away his speciality, the kilo, to accommodate BMX in Beijing. The Scot has admitted to almost quitting but he decided to set himself new goals and emerged four years later as the world's greatest sprinter in both the power events and the more tactical ones. When I spoke to Hoy about this at the Nationals last week, his message was clear: if you want a new challenge, you'll find it.

He's right, of course, His Royal Hoyness usually is. And who knows, perhaps this is the burning injustice that will motivate Romero to a third Olympic medal in different sports/events (rowing, track cycling and road cycling) and Wiggins to Tour de France glory. The UCI would struggle to scrap that.

As well as my blogs, you can follow me when I'm out and about at http://twitter.com/bbc_matt

ps And if you want to read an interview with the man who helped Hoy get over losing his favourite event, click here. It's a great read.

It's not his carbon fibre bike, or something he's eaten, or some new trick in training that has somehow produced even more power in those famous quads.

The weapon is a mild-mannered 56-year-old chap from the north-east of England who, by his own admission, knows "next to nothing" about professional cycling and has never once cycled round a velodrome.

Steve Peters is the British team's psychiatrist, the Oliver Sacks of cycling. He has variously been described as a "genius" (Dave Brailsford) and "the reason I am riding today" (Vicky Pendleton). "Without Steve I don't think I could have brought home the triple golds from Beijing," Hoy has said.

"I do get phone calls from cyclists in the middle of the night," laughs Peters. "But at the end of the day, that's what I'm here for. I can catch my sleep up some other time."

Since the record-breaking successes of the British cyclists in Beijing, however, he is a man in demand. Like his boss Brailsford, he has been tapped up by other countries and other sports, and like head coach Shane Sutton, he will be trackside for every minute of the action over the next three days.

"On the day of competition a lot of people start to lose it," explains Peters, perched high in the stands at the Manchester velodrome, cyclists hammering round the banked boards behind him like gaudy clockwork toys.

"Anxiety starts getting the better of them. They start saying things like, 'I really don't want these feelings, I really don't want these thoughts, and they're stopping me from competing at my best'.

"Chris is a very anxious man at times. In the keirin, his chimp can threaten to take over six or seven times."

Ah yes. The chimp. Peters has a way with animal-based metaphor - he once said all elite athletes could be categorised as Labradors, Rottweilers, Alsatians or poodles - but it's his depiction of the chimp as the irrational, emotional side of someone's personality that is the most striking.

"When I let my enormous chimp out," explained Hoy, "I started thinking like a pessimist. I had a tremendous sense of foreboding, wondering about the what ifs, about crashes and mistakes."

"Chris is an excellent pupil," says Peters. "There was a lot of motivation for him, a lot of engagement and a willingness to try, and then a lot of effort - so therefore a lot of success.

"Dave Brailsford was supervising me back in 2003, when I was just part-time. He's not that keen on psychiatry or psychology but he wanted me to show my worth, so he gave me Chris and said, 'Is there anything you can do here?'

"I wanted to give Chris the skills to ask why it was happening, why he was allowing it to happen and how he could get round that. So we worked on that for a long time. Before Athens, we rehearsed everything for hours. He probably did more hours of mental training than he did physical."

Athens was a tipping-point for both Hoy and Peters. The three riders in the kilo before Hoy all broke the world record. Rather than being overwhelmed by self-doubt and anxiety, Hoy used a step-by-step mental drill that the pair had been working on for months.

"It was only with about 10 metres to go until the finish line that he first looked up and thought, hey, I'm in an Olympic final," marvels Peters. "It was almost the perfect mental display.

"Once Dave saw what was going on, he said, 'Everyone has to meet you - this is powerful stuff!' but I didn't want that - I wanted them to approach me. After about three years pretty much everyone had knocked on the door and at least said, 'Can I just see what you're doing, see what you might do for me.'"

Peters speaks with a quiet self-confidence. While his career switch into sport was something he could never have envisaged ("It was an accident, really") he is absolutely certain in what he is doing.

"Some of the team don't need me. With other athletes it might be one per cent or nothing. But for the majority, being in control of their emotions can be the difference between success and failure."

Where Hoy overcame his chimp in Athens, Pendleton was unsaddled by hers. It is her subsequent successes that Peters seems most proud of.

"Vicky had the skills on the bike, the power and the ability, but what she couldn't do was control the fears and the anxieties, so when she came to competition she massively underperformed. She wanted to disengage, to actually get off the bike.

"What I wanted her to do was engage with her emotions, work on the mental skills so she could get back on the bike and fulfil her potential. If you wanted her to say what percentage difference her mental skills made, she's likely to say very high."

So what exactly does Peters do? Is there one simple piece of advice he could give to all amateur sportsmen to instantly improve their performance?

"There is no recipe," he says. "You're working with an individual mind that might take you anywhere. You, Tom, might tell me that the more people out there on a day of competition the better you feel, whereas someone else might say the direct opposite. It's a unique interpretation of your world and belief systems, and I have to work with that. It's very complex and it can take some time to unravel.

"I would get to know you really well, ask you what it is you want to do and why you can't get there. Everyone has unique beliefs or behaviours that are stopping them, so I would work on those things that are specific for you.

"Everyone comes in with different agenda. It might be, 'Can I communicate better with my coach,' 'Can I understand my discipline more easily,' 'Can I be a happier person,' 'Can I be more motivated'.

"I like to work half the time with the athlete and half the time with the coach. They're the experts. All I can do is oil the wheels, ask the coach what it is that he or she can't do."

Before each race this weekend, Peters will be trackside, ready to assist each rider in their own unique way.

"We use a structured five-stage mental warm-up, just as you would use a structured physical warm-up. They all want different things. Some want to chat to you while they're on the rollers, warming up; some just want you to say hello so they know you're around if they need you, others might give you a phone call.

"What I'm effectively doing is putting you in a zone where you want to be there, and you're ready to focus very quickly on your event."

Peters is in his ninth year with British cycling, his fifth full-time. As with many in the British set-up, from riders to coaches, he is aware of the need for fresh challenges after the outstanding results in Beijing.

Both Hoy and Pendleton could be forgiven for losing their hunger and motivation after achieving their career goals in the Laoshan Velodrome. Peters too could have stepped away, moved into a new and more lucrative area, but there are two big reasons why he intends to stay put for a while.

The first is Team Sky, the forthcoming British road-racing team that will make its Tour de France next summer. "Dave wants me to work in the same way, so that we have a psychological power base and can get optimum performances. I hope we can replicate our success on the track and win the Tour. It should happen."

The second is the people he has around him in Manchester. "I love this team. Dave is a personal friend, Shane Sutton (head coach) is a personal friend, Chris Boardman - we've all become friends. As long as we're all a team, and I don't get too old, I can't see myself moving on. I'm just a minion in the system, but it's a fantastic atmosphere working here."

PS For an interesting blog from my colleague Matt Slater on the proposed changes to the London 2012 track cycling programme, click here.

This weekend we mark 1000 days to go, so even my basic arithmetic says that's 114 more crosses on the calendar - and the countdown clock feels like it's speeding up. So this is a quick review of the progress we're making and the challenges ahead.

There's not been much obvious change in the main stadium since I was last there in July, but there's been a transformation elsewhere.

The Aquatics Centre has its roof in place with, in its interesting design, the rest of the building to follow; the International Broadcast Centre is at full height with some of the external cladding underway; and you can see the steel frame of the Velodrome looking remarkably like the kind of place Chris Hoy will tear around in 2012.
The new park will include a 6,000 seat velodrome, which will host the indoor cycling events

Our sport planning is similarly advancing. We haven't resolved the question of where our studios are going to be based yet, but the options are narrowing down.

There are some great views from the periphery of the Olympic Park and our main job is to find somewhere in the heart of the action that supplements those.

Meanwhile, our engineers and production team are devising the technical plans for our coverage; we're monitoring the evolving timetable for the Games themselves; and we met senior members of the London Organising Committee this week to discuss how we can best deliver a sport legacy through more people taking part in physical activity across the UK.

The BBC's timetable for the year as a whole is also becoming clearer. We hope to be celebrating the first Diamond Jubilee since 1897 with royal events and performance in addition to the Cultural Olympiad - and there'll be landmarks across 2012 from the New Year's Eve fireworks to the lighting of the Olympic and then its journey round every part of the UK even before we get to July and the arrival of thousands of athletes and scores of world leaders for the Olympic Opening Ceremony.

There will be a series of huge stories for BBC News and for our teams in the Nations and Regions, and this week we brought a party of colleagues from across the UK to a meeting where we started kicking round ideas about how we make everyone feel they're sharing the experiences.

I won't go into detail here about the other working groups within the BBC 2012 project because they will get a post of their own as they come up with firm plans.

What they all have in common, we'd like to think, is ambition; but what we recognise too is that events of this scale are complex and require a multitude of partners working together to produce results.

Some of that work is already fizzing with energy but I've no reason yet to change what I wrote in The Spectator in June this year:

"the Olympics offer a great insight into the way Britain works. There are the hoped-for successes - many people in London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog) and the Olympic Delivery Authority are impressive - and there are the Quangos. In quite a lot of support areas it's not clear who's running what, and many of the initiatives around the Games have a baffling number of fingers in the pies..."

I said then that what would solve this, and remove redundant fingers, was the fact deadlines were getting closer. There are encouraging signs this is happening - as in the way the Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House, Tony Hall, is trying to sort out the Cultural Olympiad.

But if there's a resolution to be made around the 1000 day mark it should be that a sharp focus is mandatory: identifying the targets and then cracking on with delivering them. I'm sure we can do this, but it's still a big job with the number of days left down to just three figures.

How could I not recognise the genius of a ping pong diplomat who could so succinctly sum up the national character with a reference to our desire to cancel the cheese course, clear the plates away and get the bats out?

But promising to bring a sport home and doing it are two different things. A bit like his "Boris Island" plan, repatriating table tennis is a nice idea but it won't come cheap and Johnson isn't paying.

That obligation falls upon Britain's Olympic bosses and they need a better reason to invest than fine rhetoric or historical sentiment - they want medal potential, which is why they will be looking to Sheffield this week for signs of whiff-whaff life.

Watch Matt Slater's report on the funding crisis that is threatening Britain's hopes of competing in the Olympic table tennis tournament in 2012

Partially funded by UK Sport, the body that dishes out public money to elite sport in this country, the English Open's 65th edition has attracted 13 of the world's top 20 players in both the male and female rankings.

Trading shots with the very best from China, Germany and Korea will be 26 British players, including 23 in the under-21 section. Foremost among those will be the 19-year-old Paul Drinkhall, our brightest prospect since Desmond Douglas in the 1980s.

Drinkhall, an affable and modest lad from Middlesbrough, has just joined the senior tour after a stellar junior career which saw him reach three in the rankings and lose in the final of the world championships. And he has already shown signs that there is more to come, claiming a stunning victory in the under-21 competition at the Chinese Open in June.

That's the good news. The bad news is that British table tennis' current good health is pretty relative - the last decade has not been a good one for those who have followed Johnson's games-obsessed aristos.

Like most minority sports in this country, table tennis needs Olympic (or other major championship) success to initiate the virtuous cycle of sports funding - points mean prizes. Failure has the reverse effect.

With no money to spare the English Table Tennis Association has been unable to stage ping pong's "Wimbledon" for eight years. This means less exposure, which means less money, which means fewer full-time players and coaches, which means less chance of success and so on. It's a horrible downward spiral and the sport should be congratulated for pulling itself out of it.

Unfortunately, table tennis' green shoots came too late to survive the chop in the great British Olympic budget cut of last year.

A failure to raise a hoped-for £100m from the private sector left a hole in Team GB's 2012 war chest. Table tennis was one of eight Olympic sports to see its allocation slashed, going from £2.53m for Beijing to £1.21m for London.

This was a devastating blow for a sport starting to get its act together but hardly surprising when you consider the facts: no British player has qualified for the Olympics since Matthew Syed in 2000, Drinkhall, while very talented and years off his peak, is still outside the top 100 and our last significant victory came at the 1954 world championships when Rosalind Rowe and Diane Scholer-Rowe won the women's doubles.

And that is without mentioning the elephant in the dining room, China.

The hosts took gold, silver and bronze in the men's and women's singles in Beijing and might have done the same if they could have fielded second and third strings in the respective team competitions.

The Asian superpower has won 20 of the 24 available gold medals since table tennis gained Olympic status in 1988 and it has been a similar story at the worlds.

But China's domination of table tennis goes deeper than the medal count. It has been estimated that 200m of the world's 300m table tennis players are Chinese (in comparison, the latest figures claim there are 190,000 regular players in England) and a quick glance at the rankings will illustrate just how deep their talent pool goes.

One consequence of this is the high number of Chinese players now competing under flags of convenience. A British coach told me about a European competitor that had recently held trials for a batch of Chinese juniors, the winners were given new passports within the week.

What's most frustrating about this is British table tennis could have gone down this route as well, achieving better short-term results and earning more funding. The governing body took a more principled view, however, building from the bottom with a young squad of domestic talent. But they've paid for it with reduced rations.

Watch Matt Slater being thrashed by a table tennis robot ahead of the English Open

The implications of this are very serious indeed. Having set up a national table tennis centre in Sheffield, hired additional staff and embarked on a training and competition programme designed for results in 2012 and beyond, the authorities decided to take their UK Sport budget over two years, not four.

This has enabled them to continue what they've been doing for the last couple of years but means the money will run out in 2011. Hardly ideal for bringing ping pong home or helping the government achieve its ambitious 2012 legacy targets of inspiring a generation to play more sport.

Because that is the real missed opportunity here - table tennis is a remarkably accessible sport. It can be played almost anywhere (as Johnson pointed out), is easy to grasp, a lot of fun and perfect for densely populated countries with a shortage of good outdoor space. The same set of reasons that made table tennis so attractive to Chairman Mao are very quietly increasing the numbers playing the sport in this country too.

So there is a lot riding on Drinkhall, Darius Knight and the rest of our young squad in Sheffield this week. They need to be more like Andy Murray and Laura Robson at Wimbledon and less like the rest of the British contingent. An early surrender will only confirm the view that this is not a sport worth investment.

I wish them well for a few different reasons. First, they're a cracking bunch. Second, it is a great sport to play and watch, particularly live. And third, if we are to have any chance of getting a million more people playing more sport after 2012, games we can play on our dining tables are going to be crucial.

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With just more than 1,000 days to go to the opening ceremony, we found plenty of critics who don't believe the promises made during the bid are being kept, especially those about jobs and training, housing and sporting opportunities.

We've been making a film for BBC One's Inside Out programme in London. You can see it on Monday October 26 at 1930 GMT on BBC One or watch it here..

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Unions told us that the promises about training are not being kept because there are not enough apprentices working at the Olympic Park.

We also talked to people who are worried that there are going to be fewer affordable homes available than originally planned.

We also went to Manchester to see Britain's former NBA basketball star John Amaechi, a former 2012 ambassador. He says the structures are not in place to deliver the biggest promise made by 2012 - to inspire millions of children to take up sport.

I put these criticisms to the new chief executive of the Olympic Legacy Company, Andrew Altman, in his first broadcast interview. The American urban planner is optimistic that London can deliver but admits the job is the biggest he has ever had.

What I've also learned is that the Legacy Company doesn't have control over what will happen to the Olympic Village after the Games because of the way the land has been set up by the Olympic Delivery Authority.

That means they can't influence which company or companies might buy up some of the homes afterwards.

Given that the village is a crucial part of making the legacy plans work, this is a worrying revelation for the Legacy Company.

It's a hugely enjoyable part of the job, and almost every day we come across a new thought with potential. But inevitably some ideas crop up more than once.

When I was first dealing with this a couple of years back in BBC Sport the most common pitch was "let's follow a bunch of young people, help train them and then see if they win gold medals in London 2012".

It was usually in the form of a reality show or observational documentary, and it was fine except for one thing. The world unfortunately isn't like that.

The people who'll win gold in London will already be in the national team and they may well have made the final or semi-final of their event in Beijing.

The top athletes don't emerge from nowhere, as Kelly Holmes or Steve Redgrave or Chris Hoy will testify. So there's certainly some merit in following the hopefuls - and our Olympic Dreams programme has been doing that - but it isn't possible to convert complete amateurs into medallists in a six-part series for Saturday nights.

Now the most frequent idea we're getting is to do something that will climax in the Opening Ceremony on the 27th of July in 2012.

Could the nation's best amateur dancers shimmy their way into the Stratford stadium? Or prize-winning choirs might sing, or could we somehow involve the brightest and nicest set of young people who've done most in volunteering for their communities?

Many of the proposals on these lines have a lot of merit, but again there are some real-world facts that apply.

First, the ceremonies are run by the London organisers - and they're currently looking for a creative director to lead the planning. His or her vision will be crucial.

Second, at least one promise has been made already - that some of the nation's seven-year-olds will be there.

Should prize-winning choirs perform at the Opening Ceremony in 2012?

But third and most important, this is the biggest of all global moments.

A peak-time show in the UK is doing incredibly well if it has 10 million viewers. This event has one hundred times that with a live audience of one billion made up of people in China and Paraguay - who need to find the ceremony as comprehensible as the folk back home in Chester and Plymouth.

So the amusing dancer guys from Britain's Got Talent may not quite hit the mark. Nor will everyone agree with the lobbying on Facebook, but it's possible that for us and for the organisers there's an idea of pure gold that's just around the corner.

And what's giving our team a surge of energy now is that we're entering a period when we're making real decisions.

For a long time we were listening to views, getting the outline plans in place, setting off down interesting avenues of exploration about what London 2012 might mean.

We're still doing some of that but now it's also about saying "yes" or "no" and starting to tackle the detail.

Inevitably that means disappointment for some if their project isn't one that gets the green light; but it also means we can see the shape of what's actually going to happen more clearly.

That's true every single day, and in my next blog I'm aiming to say more about that - as we pass another big milestone on the Olympic journey.

Let's say we're talking about two children and two adults. That would get you four very good seats at a West End show, and it more than covers a family day out at a theme park, including travel costs. You could probably tack on a slap-up meal.

If you chipped in with some of your own small change, you could even take your posse to two home games at a top Premier League football club.

But that cash would not have stretched to good seats at the World Gymnastics at London's O2 Arena on either Saturday or Sunday of last week.

Can that be right? Can Olympic sports in the UK afford ticket prices that their supporters can't?

If you wanted four of the best seats available at the World Gymnastics on Saturday or Sunday, you would have paid £60 per person.

There was no sign on the event's website of any discount for children. So no matter the ages involved, four tickets cost £240 - plus that most hilarious of stealth taxes, the booking fee - for four hours of gymnastics.

There were cheaper seats. "Silver" tickets put you at the end of the arena or above the "gold" seats but, at £45 each, that is still £180 for four. "Bronze" tickets, far up in the rafters, were a slightly more comfortable £30 each.

Earlier in the week you could have paid between £10 and £22 each for a full 12 hours of gymnastics, during qualifying. The finest gymnasts in the world cost you less than £2 an hour on those days, instead of up to £20 an hour at the weekend.

But how are you expected to get out of work, or weasel the children out of school, to go on a weekday?

Throughout our week-long coverage of the World Championships, I had plenty of people get in touch with me, face to face and via email, about this.

"It may be a World Championships but prices are too high, especially if you're going to take the family," wrote Gareth.

"The tickets are over-priced. If it was cheaper, I'd be back today," Nicole told me via Twitter on Sunday, having been to Saturday's finals.

"Way too expensive - I would have loved to have gone this week, but couldn't afford it," added Jessica.

In the wake of medals for Brits Beth Tweddle and Daniel Keatings, the Worlds have been hailed as a success. So I raised these concerns with Brian Stocks, chief executive of British Gymnastics.

"We had the biggest audience ever for a gymnastics event in this country, but comments about the ticket pricing are reasonable," he admitted.

"The event cost £3m to stage, and it will struggle to break even, so the rationale behind the ticket prices was trying to meet that cost.

"London is not the cheapest of cities in which to run things and, to be blunt, you wouldn't want to run a World Championships coming out of this recession."

Fans from gymnastics clubs were offered discounted tickets to the World Championships

Ticket prices are set by AEG, the group which operates the O2 Arena, which had a capacity of 12,000 for this event. Stocks told me AEG had a policy "they thought was fair".

He added: "The finals were expensive - in the expensive seats. But there were special arrangements quite early on for members of gymnastics associations to buy tickets cheaply."

That's fine if you're already a member of an association and keen to attend, but a World Championships in London is the best opportunity a sport like gymnastics will get to bring first-time fans through the door.

Arena operators AEG say the final three days of the competition performed well at the box office, with 10,000 tickets sold for each of Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and another 10,000 spread between the preceding three days.

"Sales were good when we launched a year ago and steady throughout the year," AEG's Lucy Ellison told me.

"Tuesday and Thursday (the days on which only the men competed, Thursday being when Keatings won a silver medal in the all-around) weren't as good, but still did OK. We were thrilled with the way it went."

AEG add that various deals had been available through newspapers and other promoters although, to my knowledge, none appeared on the official website of the event. (This cached version of the tickets page, which at the time of writing shows the page as it appeared on the Friday of the Worlds, doesn't show any.)

But those figures suggest Keatings' silver, unprecedented for any British male gymnast, was watched by at best a half-empty arena.

Away from the tickets, Stocks is as thrilled as you'd expect for a man whose organisation now boasts a world champion in Tweddle and a silver medallist in Keatings.

"To have gymnastics appearing ahead of football on the BBC was quite interesting, and now we need help from commercial organisations to work with us," he said.

"Nobody wants to support us if we don't get the results, but now we've positioned ourselves as a sport which can deliver in 2012."

I saw every twist, tumble, and dismount of the six-day competition, and Britain's gymnasts are certainly capable of Olympic medals.

But it worries me that other Olympic sports might look at the World Gymnastics, see a successful example to follow, and price families with a casual interest out of the market.

I'm not sure the priority should be getting these sports into their London 2012 venues - we've got test events in 2011 for that. The emphasis now should be on getting fans interested before the Olympics arrives.

Gymnastics has another chance with the European Championships in Birmingham next year, and hopefully prices will be lower than for the Worlds.

After all, is it better to sell one ticket at £60, or two at £30? Do you hold a major event at a prestigious venue, attracting column inches but forcing supporters to shoulder some of the cost, or hold it somewhere else, risk losing some media coverage, and bring prices down?

Lord Coe, Chairman of the London 2012 organising committee, needs to make sure the right balance is struck in three years' time. He told BBC Sport he's "working through the ticketing strategy" for events like this at the Olympics.

"We want to make as many of those tickets as accessibly-priced as possible," he said. "It's not just the price of the tickets, it's making sure people can come from outside London.

"For a mother and father and two or three kids from Sheffield, we've got to make that accessible as well. We realise that this is a very serious thing to get right and we will."

If you were at the Worlds, I'd be interested to know what you thought. What are ticket prices like for similar events in other sports you follow, and what were your overall impressions of the Worlds? If you didn't go along, were the prices a factor in your decision?

Update, 1702 BST: I'd like to express my condolences to the family of Yury Ryazanov, the Russian gymnast who claimed a bronze medal last week, who has died in a car crash. It was a shock to hear the news having had the pleasure of seeing him perform so well only days ago, and it puts things like ticket prices in perspective.

At the press conference staged to hail the best floor gymnast in the world, Beth Tweddle showed that when it comes to the age-old question about London 2012, her forward defensive is pretty handy too.

"Three years is a long time away, we'll have to take one step at a time and see if I'm there," she told the assembled reporters.

I don't buy a word of that. The only thought going through her head right now must be how it felt, lifting that gold medal in front of thousands of her own fans, in her own capital city.

Tweddle may be 24 - all but pensionable in gymnastics terms - but she can win at the London Olympics, and one little chink in the armour emerged after Sunday's drama which shows she wants it badly enough to push on.

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Speaking after her monumental, gold medal-winning routine on the floor, she was discussing something completely different - the provision of gymnastics facilities in the UK - when she threw in a telling aside.

"There are a lot of kids out there who want to do gymnastics," she said. "We just need more facilities because somewhere out there are the stars of 2016 and beyond.

"But they can't have 2012, because that's my spot."

Tacked innocuously on the end of her answer, a moment of lucidity which cuts through all that stuff and nonsense about wait-and-see.

Of course, she's right to say those things. Very sensible. Very reasonable. But inside her mind will be the dream of playing out Sunday's events one more time, in an Olympic setting.

"Beth's an old lady in gymnastics terms - she describes herself as an OAP," her mother, Ann, told me. "But she's enjoying it so much, and while the body is still going strong, she might as well carry on.

"She's driven, and she wants to do this, so she'll carry on for as long as she wants to. I hope she makes it to 2012."

Tweddle celebrates after her victory - will similar scenes be repeated in three years time?

But if anybody is going to give me an objective verdict on Tweddle's future, it is Colin Still.

Still, the coach of the British women's team, has enjoyed the luxury of watching from the stands as his charges work with their individual coaches, since there has been no team competition at this year's Worlds.

He has been doing his job for long enough to be surprised by few things, but Tweddle's longevity is one of them.

"She could go to 26 or 27 and reach 2012, no problem," Still confidently asserted when we spoke. "But that's unusual. Most female gymnasts retire at 22, maximum.

"Nobody in Great Britain has gone on as long as Beth before, and it's unlikely many will in the future because the sport is so demanding."

Still believes a decision facing Tweddle in 12 months' time will prove the ultimate Beth barometer.

"In October 2010, does she take the easy option of the Commonwealth Games, or the harder option of the World Championships?

"Once she makes that decision, if she goes for the Commonwealth Games, then her realistic chance of 2012 starts to disappear.

"But at this point in time I think she's on track for the Worlds, and therefore 2012."

For almost a decade, Tweddle's name has been associated with the pinnacle of gymnastics in Britain, an association she reinforced in style on Sunday, just as it was looking like Daniel Keatings might syphon off precious column inches.

But Tweddle's role at 2012 doesn't have to be the burdensome one of shouldering the British team's medal hopes, as it has been at Olympic Games past.

Louis Smith proved as much last year, Keatings has shown his potential, and Still has earmarked at least three young women he believes can inherit Tweddle's starring role.

"Becky Downie is British champion and she thinks she's going to be the next one to lead the country - maybe into 2012," said Still.

"But there's Hannah Whelan, sitting in Liverpool and coached by Amanda Kirby, who coaches Beth, and she's in the wings waiting to go.

"Then there are two youngsters coming up from Heathrow, Danusia Francis and Nicole Hibbert, who will reach the senior ranks next year at the right age, with the right experience.

"At the moment, the public haven't heard of these gymnasts, but they're waiting for the 2010 World Championships to launch their careers and they should be there in London."

Whelan, 17, was in the O2 Arena on Sunday to watch her friend and training partner become a world champion. When I asked her about Tweddle and 2012, she dutifully trotted out the "Beth's taking it year by year" line, then demonstrated the phenomenon is contagious.

"I hope to be at 2012. It would be great if I could get there and have the chance to do it again," she said, alluding to her appearance in the British team at Beijing 2008 - not one many outside gymnastics would be able to recall.

"I'm not really thinking about it too much right now," she added. "My coaches already know it's what I want and we're taking it step by step."

It must be a gymnastics thing. It's impossible to play a long game when the nature of the sport demands you put your body through twists, turns, flips and falls that strain every fibre.

But, riding the wave of optimism Britain's gymnasts amplified at the Worlds this week, a 2012 line-up with Tweddle, Smith, Keatings and Downie alongside a host of the next generation's brightest sparks is irresistible.

It has to happen, doesn't it? Go on, Beth.

An hour later, they were both wide awake. Thoughts of rest and preparation went out of the window. They put the TV on and talked into the small hours.

Sleep is unlikely to come easy in the wake of Thursday's historic achievements either. Keatings has a World Championship silver medal around his neck, unprecedented in British history, while Thomas was a hugely creditable sixth in the all-around final at the O2 Arena.

The young duo have revolutionised the country's expectations in one evening, and Keatings, barely known outside the sport, has already declared he is ready to battle for Olympic gold.

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British Gymnastics could not have scripted this. For decades, they hadn't a prayer in international competitions of this calibre.

Medals? Forget it. Jaded commentators would coast their way through a decent but unthreatening plucky-Brit performance, then move on to the real contenders.

Sixteenth place was the best a British man had managed in this event, until now.

In the run-up to the World Championships, most of the focus had been on Louis Smith.

The Olympic bronze medallist will get his chance to shine in Saturday's pommel horse final but Keatings takes centre stage for now.

"I've sat in the shadow of Louis, but that means I've been able to work hard and carry on training," said the new talisman of British Olympic aspiration soon after stepping down from the medal rostrum.

"It's helped me, Louis taking the limelight, but I'm definitely ready to take some of that now. It'll be great working alongside him towards 2012. It'll push me on the pommel and everything else. Just being alongside him is a good thing."

Keatings waves to the crowd after receiving his silver medal

As an all-rounder who competes in six events instead of one, Keatings can reasonably claim to be a better gymnast than Smith - not that the calm and softly-spoken 19-year-old ever would.

But he has worked and worked and worked to get to this point in his career.

He took up gymnastics aged five, was training three or four times each week by the age of eight, and dedicated at least 32 hours each week to his sport, around his schoolwork, by the time he was 12.

"You have to be really dedicated and make a lot of sacrifices," he said. "My friends are really supportive of that - they like to see me achieve - and it means I'm ready to take on all the hard work in the run-up to London 2012."

The Union Square bar, a stone's throw from the gymnastics arena inside the O2, was packed on Thursday night with gymnasts, coaching staff and hangers-on celebrating Keatings' achievement.

The Corby boy's best friends, girlfriend, sister, mother, father and grandparents were all in the arena, alongside thousands of home fans, to see him hold up a medal which means so much to an entire sport.

But Keatings, tasting this kind of success for the first time, has already set the bar higher.

Kohei Uchimura, the Japanese star who produced awe-inspiring routines all evening and then said he'd had a bad day at the office, is a daunting opponent, but Keatings wants to take him on and beat him.

"I'm very confident now, and I've still got a lot to put into my routines that I've been working on," he said.

"I'm going to try to compete up there with Uchimura. He is the best gymnast in the world, but I'd like to think I can get to his standard. Give me a couple of years and I'll be there."

That would be convenient timing. We will be back here in 2012, in these same seats in the very same venue, to see if he makes it happen.

Comprende? Loud and clear, Alberto, loud and clear.

But that isn't going to stop people like me asking because Lance Armstrong versus Alberto Contador - team-mates, apparently - was this summer's sporting highlight.

Thrown together in the unlikeliest of Tour de France partnerships, the two riders fought like cats in a bag for most of the race only for Contador to settle the argument where it really mattered, on the road.

Sometimes funny, often bitchy, their sparring, on and off the bike, was never anything but engrossing. And best of all they're going to do it all over again next July and this time they don't have to pretend to be on the same side.

I normally steer clear of behind-the-scenes stuff - to paraphrase Bismarck, news stories are a bit like sausages, it is better not to see them being made - but I'll make an exception this time as it might shed some light on how LA v AC became cycling's answer to Borg v McEnroe, Prost v Senna or Southend v Colchester.

A few weeks ago, a PR man phoned to offer an interview with Contador. A broadcast exclusive, he said, at London's Cycle Show, he added.

Brilliant, I thought: the chance to talk to the world's best cyclist, on camera, only 20 minutes down the road and it's an exclusive.

Can you get me 18 holes with Tiger Woods, a private tennis lesson from Maria Sharapova and a lift home with Lewis Hamilton as well?

And then I complicated things. "What's his English like?" I asked.

"Ah", the PR man said, "not great. Will that be a problem?"

Well, I suppose that depends whether you think Contador's spats with Armstrong - conducted in the heat of battle, usually in translation - were a problem, I thought but didn't say out loud.

Not that I really needed a response, the answer came soon enough.

Contador will do the interview in English, the PR man said, providing you email the questions now so he can practise them, he can have a couple of interpreters there and you don't pull any last-minute surprises with your line of inquiries (so no Qs about you know what).

Comprende? Loud and clear, Alberto, loud and clear.

I'll fast-forward now to the interview. All in all, it went OK, considering the fact Contador was clearly nervous about speaking in a foreign language and determined not to fan Tour de France flames that have just about died down.

Died down but not extinguished.

The 26-year-old was charm personified when asked about British cycling, Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish, and he gave thoughtful replies to my questions about his Olympic ambitions and his place in the sport's history books, but it was Armstrong that brought the most considered responses.

Given all that has happened between them, it's hardly surprising.

From the moment the American announced his surprise return to cycling, the two (very different) men were probably guaranteed to clash.

They might have just avoided it if they had been out-and-out adversaries, but when Contador's team manager (and Lance's old pal) Johan Bruyneel signed Armstrong to join the Astana all-stars, a head-on collision was the only possible result.

How could the most famous cyclist in the world - a best-selling author, a fund-raising phenomenon, a friend of the rich and famous - accept second-class status to a rider who had finished over an hour behind him in 2005? Who could boss "The Boss"?

Contador, on the other hand, could rightly wonder what on earth had just happened. He was coming off a season that had seen him win the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a Espana - a feat that made him only the fifth rider in history, and the youngest, to have claimed all three of cycling's Grand Tours.

Was he now expected to return to the ranks? Wasn't this supposed to be his team?

What happened next was the mother of all turf wars - three weeks of pure playground one-upmanship.

Armstrong, back on his favourite platform, scored the early victories: getting on the right side of a split in the peloton in the third stage and then revelling in the media's appreciation of his cycling smarts.

Four days later, Contador hit back when he accelerated away from Armstrong and the other leading contenders on the climb to Andorra Arcalis. It was the kind of initiative-seizing stunt Armstrong used to pull in his pomp. It was also probably against Astana team orders.

Contador took complete control a week later on the ascent to Verbier. No amount of smarts could compensate for the younger man's legs and lungs. It was magnificent and emphatic.

As a cycling contest between the two, the rest of the Tour was slightly disappointing (the Schleck brothers had a pop at Contador but even their tag-team approach couldn't unsettle the Spaniard).

But even as you witnessed Contador's calm progress to Paris, you had to admire Armstrong's pursuit of a podium place, and you knew he was already plotting a return to the top step in 2010.

Which brings us to this week's unveiling of the battleground for Armstrong v Contador II.
They were both in Paris on Wednesday, side-by-side for the cameras but miles apart really, to help publicise next year's route - a zigzag through the Low Countries followed by a clockwise loop of France.

With four days in the Pyrenees - to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tour's inaugural visit - and two trips up the brutal Col du Tourmalet to look forward to, it appeared at first glance to be a good result for Contador.

But like a good cricket pitch, there is something in it for Armstrong too. The cobbled-stone sections in Belgium and northern France will play to his superior bike-handling skills and Contador's advantage in the mountains will be tempered by the surprisingly high number of valley-floor finishes.

Add to that the support Armstrong will gain from his hand-picked Radio Shack team (with the faithful Bruyneel at the helm) and the American, who was a little undercooked this year after injuring himself in the Giro, will be entitled to think an eighth Tour victory is possible.

Possible but not probable - far more likely is a third victory for Contador, who is resigned to racing for the always-interesting Astana for another season (Armstrong and Contador were reunited briefly in Paris to deflect the by now traditional fresh doping allegations that dog the team and the sport in general).

When I asked him in London about Armstrong coming back at him even harder next year, "El Pistolero" didn't seem unduly perturbed.

"Lance has a new team so, yes, he will be dangerous. But it's OK, I believe in me and my concentration and my team. So we will see."

Indeed we will, Alberto, indeed we will.

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In that time, we've seen more than 24 solid hours of gymnastics action. It's been a feast for the eyes, with plenty to grab the attention on and off the apparatus.

Here are some photos from around the arena, and a taste of what's been going on away from Louis Smith's pommel horse heroics and Beth Tweddle's uneven bars disappointment.

And if you want more, you can check out regular updates on Twitter, and the rest of our photos on Flickr.

Here's Matt Baker - former gymnast, ex-Blue Peter presenter and now gymnastics guru for the BBC - hard at work leafing through notes during women's qualifying.

On the left is one of the many bits of kit we've got up here. That box controls the microphone and headset for Christine Still, top British coach and Matt's BBC colleague at the Worlds, during our live broadcasts for the rest of the week.

During a break in qualifying on Tuesday, Matt and commentator Mitch Fenner could be found messing about with GarageBand, a piece of software which lets you make your own songs.

They're threatening to record a duet by the time the week is out. I'll take suggestions for any covers you'd like to hear, if only to head off the prospect of an original composition.

Matt's enthusiasm for gymnastics is irrepressible and contagious. At one point another former gymnast, Craig Heap, had to hold him down to stop the leaping around that inevitably follows every British performance.

After her fall from the uneven bars on Wednesday, Beth Tweddle - on the right, above - contemplated her future as she watched Becky Downie in the evening qualifying session, with Christine Still on the left in front of her.

Tweddle braved the BBC cameras in the immediate aftermath of her fall, which doesn't get any easier to watch, no matter how many times I see it.

"I got back up and the crowd cheering me on was fantastic - they finished the routine for me," she said.

"When I landed I knew my final had gone and to hear them cheering makes you feel that little bit better."

Going down a storm at the World Championships are the British leotards.

I'm told that when some of the girls were presented with their kit, they were pretty underwhelmed.

But the leotards look the business under the arena spotlights, illuminating the Union Jack picked out in sequins.

Less well-received has been the surface of the floor exercise area.

On several occasions, technicians have been spotted lifting up the mat and rummaging beneath (above right), applying liberal stretches of duct tape in an effort to fix an unspecified issue.

Not that anybody, to my knowledge, has been brave enough to use that as an excuse.

US star Bridget Sloan finished fifth in the all-around on Wednesday, reaching two finals, but had a face of fury (above left) after her disappointing performance on the balance beam.

She and her coach watched her competitors silently in the aftermath, but Sloan turned things around with a superb performance on the uneven bars.

The US gymnasts had a fine day, with four women securing seven final berths.

"SOOOO proud of all my girls!" tweeted another big name in US gymnastics - Nastia Liukin, the 2008 Olympic champion. She isn't competing in London after a summer packed with commercial and TV commitments.

Fans at the O2 Arena (some of whom are pictured, above left) have been enjoying plenty of enthralling action, but they'd like one tiny addition: an idea of who's winning.

I've spoken to audience members who say the two scoreboards are nigh-on useless for most events, as they only show the score of each gymnast currently performing, and a run-down of the overall scores.

That's useful for the all-around competition (which uses the overall scores as its basis), but means it's hard to catch a glimpse of who's leading on any one set of apparatus, like the vault or the beam.

At one point, we had Beth Tweddle leaning over to ask the BBC team where she stood in the floor event qualifying.

If Beth can't find out how she's getting on without asking us, how are the fans supposed to know? (You can always ask me on Twitter, by the way - several people in the arena did!)

Hopefully it won't be as big a problem for the finals, where fewer things will be happening at once.

But whatever happens, you can rely on the immaculate note-taking of BBC Radio 5 live's Alison Mitchell (pictured, above right).

Ali spent the morning neatly ruling her notepad and diligently copying across notes from her time at the gymnastics in Beijing last summer.

Matt Baker tried to convince me that his colour-coded pre-printed system was better, but I still prefer my method: ask Matt or Ali for the answer.

That's what some of Ali's followers on Twitter have been doing, too.

Most of them are used to her regular updates from cricket matches across the globe, so she's been struggling to explain the intricacies of gymnastics to hardened members of the Barmy Army.

Her verdict? "Still love cricket, but this is seriously cool. Must practice my double twisting double back."