Bach’s London date

iAAF president Lord Coe’s decision to break ranks with other olympic sports and ban serial drug offenders, Russia, from competing in the track and field at Rio is said to have so annoyed ioC chairman thomas Bach that he was rarely if ever seen attending the athletics programme at last summer’s olympics.

So it will be intriguing to see if Bach, whose ioC executive board have a meeting with Coe’s iAAF on the day the World Athletics Championships starts on August 4, will be seen alongside Lord Coe at the London Stadium watching Mo Farah’s 10,000m race that night.

Since Bach’s Rio snub, two opportunities have passed for Coe to be proposed to join the ioC, despite the pivotal importance of the iAAF to the olympic movement. However, relationships between the two powerbrokers are said to have improved.

SPORTS MINISTER Tracey Crouch has credited FA chairman Greg Clarke for paving the way for her huge achievement of getting 50 sports to accept governance code changes, with just two — Table Tennis England and the British Mountaineering Council — not having action plans in place. Football was the big beast that would set the tone and Clarke embracing reforms proved to be Crouch’s catalyst for change.

FoRMeR Sunderland manager David Moyes was fined £30,000 by the FA for threatening to slap BBC reporter Vicki Sparks after a post-match interview last season. But the published FA commission report details a surprising lack of evidence. the panel concluded: ‘it is a curiosity that there is no witness statement or any other kind of direct evidence from Ms Sparks herself.’