26/11/2011

Matthew Pinsent hosts another round up of reports featuring aspiring Olympians from around the world.

12,000 athletes will compete in the London Olympics - all will be wearing their country's colours with pride, except possibly Majlinda Kelmendi. She is a young judo fighter from Kosovo, a nation that has yet to be formally recognised by the International Olympic Committee. Will she make it to London 2012?

Haider Rashid is a rower from Iraq who trains on the river Tigris in Baghdad. It used to be a war zone where sessions were routinely interrupted by road blocks, rocket blasts and even floating corpses.

We discover why archer Im Dong-Hyun is struggling to make the South Korean team - and it's not because he is legally blind.

Proud Yorkshireman Alistair Brownlee shows us the punishing training regime in the Swiss Alps that enabled him to claim his second world triathlon title.

And finally, is time running out for Namibia's Olympic hopeful Merlin Diamond? She has been sponsored by the IOC to train at a high performance centre in Mauritius but injuries and the lack of friends and family mean she is in danger of crashing off the road to London 2012.