When The History Boys was first performed at the National Theatre in 2004 the reverential cupping of a sixth former's genitals by an appreciative retirement-age teacher was enough to elicit ceaseless gales of laughter. Today it is more likely to form the basis of an investigation by detectives from the public protection division.

Although participation in the key 16-25 age range has seen no growth

New research has revealed that athletes who travel more than five time zones for competitions are more likely to get sick compared to when they play at home.

Chinese athletes have been victims of double standards at the Olympics, the country's top official newspaper said today while questioning the expulsion of two of its players from the badminton tournament.

There's the Corinthian ethos, there's bending the rules and there's plain dishonesty. Have the Olympics become too competitive?

It's a week since Danny Boyle's warriors gave us the Industrial Revolution and the Queen fell out of the sky, and still nothing has harshed my Olympic mellow. There's a lot of joy in Olympic-land. My notepad overfloweth with tales of daftness: of dangling Boris with his pound shop flags requesting a ladder and the requests on Twitter last night for tickets to see "tomorrow's dangling Boris session".

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Badminton World Federation must shoulder some responsibility for the match-throwing scandal at the 2012 Games, Chinese state media said today.

Further sanctions may be placed on the Chinese, Indonesian and South Korean badminton teams after the International Olympic Committee confirmed this morning that it had requested a probe of the teams’ coaches and support staff.

Eight badminton players were thrown out of London 2012 yesterday after their match-fixing attempts outraged spectators and dragged the sport's Olympic tournament into farce.

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Chinese badminton player Yu Yang is planning to quit the sport after being disqualified from the Olympics yesterday.

If Sir Kingsley Amis had ever had the slightest interest in sport, he would be looking down from the great saloon bar in the sky today and reprising his grump that "more means worse".

Record-breaking gold-medal wins are all well and good. But Bradley Wiggins hasn't had things all his own way. The poor man came out of the gym earlier this week to find his kit had been pinched. The Foxhills Hotel in Surrey, where Team GB's cyclists are camped, suggested that "cycling fever" was to blame, and that "an over-zealous fan has scored a fantastic London 2012 souvenir". You'll note the use of the word "scored" to convey "stolen", presumably because they don't want their hotel to be linked in the public mind with thieves. No such worries beset Wiggins, though, who tweeted: "Watch your kit at the Foxhills spa … there is a tea-leaf about." I think this summarises exactly what I like about him: a man who uses a spa and cockney rhyming slang in a single sentence. I call that a win.

It was the boos and screams from the spectators, a sound you don't hear often in badminton, which first alerted me to the fact that something was going badly wrong at Wembley Arena.