We know that wrestling, modern pentathlon, canoeing, taekwondo and hockey were the five sports shortlisted for the ballot to be excluded from the "core" sports. Once the field of five was announced, each sport should have been given time (14, 30, 60 days?) to prepare a submission to the IOC to argue why they should be retained as a core Olympic sport. Of course, no such right was given to them.

It has been 112 years - two years longer than an Allen Stanford prison sentence - since two club sides from Great Britain and France played what, to date, has been the one and only game of cricket at the Olympic Games. We may not have to wait so long again for the sport to return to the modern Games, but there will be many hurdles to overcome first.

Of the four final candidate cities to host the 2016 Olympic Games, I believe the best choice won. Congratulations to the people behind the Rio 2016 bid.

I have serious problems in offering commiserations to the Chicago/USA camp, for all the effort put in. More analysis from me to come, but if you want eight minutes of comedy, watch this discussion from the CNBC Power Lunch crew as news broke that Chicago was the first city eliminated from voting:

I'm not a supporter of sporting boycotts in most cases. The exceptions can be distilled down to two types. One, where discrimination and exclusion is inherently carried out by the host sporting body (eg. apartheid-era South Africa). And two, where the host nation is in such a repressed, run-down state that playing international sport in those surrounds would be grossly immoral (eg. Zimbabwe, North Korea).

Boycotts of the Olympic Games are almost as old as the modern Olympics themselves. Think of Irish athletes refusing to compete in the first London Games and you realise that 2008 is the centennial year of the Olympic boycott.