The Hall of Fame, which marks the 100-year anniversary of the IAAF, will have an inaugural class of 24 athletes. The remaining 12 inductees will be announced later in the year but before the IAAF Centenary Gala on November 24 in Barcelona.

The IAAF says criteria for induction include winning at least two Olympic or world championship gold medals and setting at least one world record. Also, athletes must be retired for 10 years before becoming eligible.

The other inductees are Abebe Bikila, Paavo Nurmi, Emil Zatopek, Al Oerter, Adhemar da Silva, Ed Moses, Betty Cuthbert, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Wang Junxia.

The suspension, which runs through to August 6, 2012, means that Contador is stripped of his victory in the race that year and will be unable to take part in this year’s edition.

Contador tested positive for the banned anabolic agent clenbuterol during the 2010 Tour de France, but he was subsequently cleared by the Spanish Cycling Federation (RFEC) in February 2011, prompting the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and International Cycling Union (UCI) to appeal the decision to CAS.

The 29-year-old Spaniard claimed he had ingested the banned substance by eating a contaminated steak, an explanation which satisfied the RFEC but which failed to pass muster with the International Cycling Union (UCI) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

Apart from losing his 2010 Tour de France title, the verdict means that Contador is stripped of all his wins in 2011, which include the Giro d’Italia.

The bids deadline ran out at midnight on Thursday, with the IOC vote on the host city for 2020 scheduled to be held on September 7, 2013, in Buenos Aires. There was a chance that Durban may bid for the 2020 Games but the SA government decided against supporting a bid.

The 2012 and 2016 Games are being staged in London and Rio de Janeiro.

The IOC held a meeting in South Korea last week to examine Qatar’s candidacy, with Doha requesting that should they be chosen they want to hold the Games at the end of October and start of November rather than the traditional window between July 15 and August 31.

Qatar was snubbed by the IOC in its bid for the 2016 Games despite tying with Chicago for third place and ranking ahead of Rio in grading by the IOC’s evaluation commission because of its insistence that the Games move to October.

Azerbaijan capital city Bakou also failed to make it into the final vote for that edition.

Qatar have already been chosen to host the football World Cup in 2022.

Both Tokyo and Madrid lost out to Rio in the final vote to host the 2016 Games.

An initial selection to cull the list for 2020 of the weakest candidate will be made in May, 2012.

In January 2013, the candidate’s bid dossiers will be handed over to the IOC which will then despatch its evaluation committee to each city to assess their respective merits between February and April, 2013.

Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens of London’s Metropolitan Police told a committee of lawmakers that police sent extra officers to London’s Oxford Circus, two malls and the Olympic Park on August 8 after seeing messages on Twitter and the BlackBerry devices of people who had been arrested for rioting. Associated Press reports that Owens said that “through Twitter and BBM there was intelligence that the Olympic site, Westfields [shopping malls] and Oxford Street were going to be targeted.”

“We were able to secure all those places and indeed there was no damage at any of them,” she said, according to London’s Evening Standard newspaper.

Police and politicians claim young criminals used Twitter and Blackberry’s simple and largely cost-free messaging service to co-ordinate looting sprees during the riots.

The government said police would get better training and stronger powers to deal with a new and unpredictable era of street disturbances.

“We will make sure police have the powers they need,” said Home Secretary Theresa May — including, she suggested, the power to impose blanket curfews in troubled areas.

Reuters reports that Matsui told JOC president Tsunekazu Takeda that Hiroshima had debts still outstanding from staging the 1994 Asian Games which it was struggling to pay off.

“The city is still continuing to repay loans from the Hiroshima Asian Games in 1994 and we are still face financial difficulties,” Matsui told reporters. “In fact we were unable to find evidence of any proper bid timetable (under former Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba).”

Hiroshima initially proposed a joint “peace bid” with Nagasaki in a move by the only cities to have suffered an atomic attack to promote nuclear disarmament.

Nagasaki abandoned its 2020 Olympic ambitions last January, however, citing financial difficulties. Matsui decided to formally pull the plug on Hiroshima’s already flagging bid after being elected in April.

“It’s a shame that (Hiroshima) has pulled out but it’s unavoidable,” said Takeda. “We accept the decision.”

IOC chief Rogge said in an interview with the Evening Standard that cricket could be a successful addition to the summer Olympics, although it would most likely be in the Twenty20 format.

“The International Cricket Council will decide at the end of June whether they will make an application. The incoming president might be interested. We would welcome an application,” Rogge said. “It’s an important, popular sport and very powerful on television.

“It’s a sport with a great tradition where mostly you have a respect of the ethics. In the Olympics, it will not be Test cricket, of course.”

Cricket has appeared in the Games before, featuring in the 1900 Paris Olympics, when Britain took gold ahead of France in a competition that featured only two teams.

Rogge described himself as a devoted cricket fan, watching Test matches on television from his office in Lausanne. “I love the game. I have watched Sachin Tendulkar, Kevin Pietersen, Shane Warne, Ian Botham. It’s tactically very interesting, a game of patience, a game of great skills and the only sport where, after five days, you can have a draw!” he was quoted by the Standard as saying.

Rogge meanwhile warned the authorities would need to be vigilant against the threat of illegal bookmakers targeting the event. “We had monitoring in Vancouver and in Beijing and there was no sign of illegal betting in either those Games. But it would be naive to say this could not happen at the London Olympics. Of course, I am worried it could happen. We have to be ready,” he said.

“It’s even worse than doping. Imagine a team sport with one player being doped; that one player will not make the difference to the result.

“But if you have match rigging with the goalkeeper being paid off and jumping over the ball, it’s the whole match that is lost. So the scale is far more important in terms of match manipulation.”

The New York Times reports that Waitz was just 18 when she competed in the women’s 1,500-metre race at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. She was eliminated in the first round in Munich but her career as a competitive runner and pioneering athlete was just getting started.

Ms. Waitz set the world record at 3,000 metres in the summer of 1975, but did not make the finals of the 1,500 at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Her chance at a third straight Olympics was foiled when Norway joined the American-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Fred Lebow, the director of the New York City marathon, invited Ms. Waitz to compete in the 1978 New York race. It would be her first-ever marathon, and it was understood that she would run as a rabbit, or early pacesetter, for the established and favored women marathoners.

She also planned to use the trip to New York to celebrate her retirement from competitive running, renew her focus on her job as a teacher, and perhaps start a family with Mr. Waitz, whom she had married in 1975.

“But, instead, I quit my job teaching and never had kids,” she said in a 2008 interview with the New York Road Runners club.

Ms. Waitz not only won the 1978 New York race, but also set a world best, finishing in 2hr 32min 30sec — two minutes faster than the previous mark.

Over the years she would win the New York event eight more times.

AFP reports that Phelps lived and trained in Ann Arbor prior to his unprecedented achievement at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where he claimed eight gold medals to take his career tally to 14.

With the swimming World Championships in Shanghai looming later this year and the 2012 Olympics in London beckoning, Phelps was looking forward more than back. “The light’s at the end of the tunnel,” Phelps said. “There are still a lot of things that I want to accomplish, and that’s why I’m still here. If I didn’t want to accomplish them, I wouldn’t have come back.”

Phelps will be joined in the field by other US Olympic stars including Natalie Coughlin, Jason Lezak and Ryan Lochte. International swimmers entered include Brazilian Cesar Cielo, the Olympic 50m freestyle gold medallist and 50 and 100m freestyle world champion.

“It just shows that we’re all sort of trying to prepare ourselves as best we can for World Championships and try to really get ready and geared up for next year,” Phelps said.

Phelps had a quiet 2010, as Lochte emerged as America’s most dominant male swimmer. Phelps’s coach, Bob Bowman, went so far as to dub Lochte was the best swimmer in the world last year.

Phelps admitted that returning to the grinding training routine that brought him Olympic glory wasn’t easy. “Trying to get back into the routine… it’s just the little challenges, when you don’t do them for a while, it’s hard to get back on it,” Phelps said. “I’ve been able to make a lot of good improvements.”

Despite the difficulties, Phelps said he didn’t want to leave the sport wondering if he could have accomplished more. “I know deep down inside that I’ve never wanted to have that ‘what-if’ in the back of my head,” Phelps said. “Once I retire, I want to be able to say, ‘I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to do, and I’m happy.’”

Certainly Phelps has been gathering steam this year. At the Indianapolis Grand Prix last month he defeated Lochte by more than two seconds in the 200m individual medley, departing Indy with five victories in five events.

He’s entered in seven events in Michigan, but was cagey about his precise plans for the meeting that starts on Friday. “Who knows what will really happen, but that’s the rumor,” Phelps said. “It should be fun.”

This follows a recommendation by the executive board of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in London on Tuesday. Sapa reports that under the new rules, a panel of independent medical experts would examine any cases of male hormone overproduction and make a recommendation on whether the athlete should be eligible to compete.

As part of the process athletes should first be referred to specialist medical centres to be advised on any treatment needed. Strict confidentiality should cover the entire process, while a final ruling would be made by individual sports federations, IOC medical commission chairperson Arne Ljungqvist said.

The issue of gender verification led to controversy at the 2009 world athletics championships when South African runner Caster Semenya was ordered to undergo sex tests after winning the 800 metre event. She was withdrawn from international competition until July 6, 2010 when the international athletics federation IAAF cleared her to return to competition.

The guidelines will go for final approval at the executive board meeting in Durban in July.

Cyclingnews.com reported that the Spaniard confirmed early reports, saying he had been “officially cleared by the Royal Spanish Cycling Federation and has been authorised to return to competition immediately.”

According to his press release, “If everything goes well, he will be at the start of Agarve tomorrow.

According to a number of Spanish newspapers, the competitions committee decided to rethink its verdict on Friday last week based on article 296 of the UCI’s regulations, which says that an athlete can be exonerated if they prove that they had inadvertently ingested a banned product through no fault or negligence on their part.

Although Contador and his legal team were unable to produce a sample of the meat that they have claimed was tainted with the clenbuterol that resulted in the positive test, the fact that it could not be shown conclusively that Contador had deliberately taken the product worked in his favour.

“First of all, I’m relieved and obviously happy about this ruling. It has been some very stressful months for me, but throughout the case, I have been totally available for all inquiries in relation to my case, and all the way through, I have spoken in accordance with the truth,” said Contador. “To both the team and the authorities I have explained that I never cheated or deliberately took a banned substance.”

El País is among the newspapers reporting that the four lawyers on the committee may also have been swayed by a tweet posted last Thursday night by Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero that said “there are no legal grounds for sanctioning Contador”. The newspaper adds that the committee spent the weekend mulling over their decision and were expecting to announce it officially on Monday, but were delayed by the complexity of the argument explaining their decision to absolve Contador.

It is also believed that the committee have relied on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s decision not to appeal against the dismissal of similar charges against German table tennis player Dimitri Ovtcharov, who tested positive for Clenbuterol after a tournament in China.

L’Equipe reported on Tuesday that there was a procedural flaw early in the case, which violated Spanish law. A letter sent from the UCI to the Spanish federation on November 8 was not also sent to Contador and his legal representatives, the French newspaper said. This was said to be in violation of the Spanish constitution and the “rights of the accused to be informed”.

Contador’s Saxo Bank team reacted positively to the news.  “This decision is indeed proof that the relevant authorities do not find grounds for believing that Alberto Contador has committed any intentional doping offence, which is absolutely vital for us. So I’m obviously happy on behalf of Alberto and the team. We take note of this decision and fully respect it, but we’re also sensitive to the fact, that the parties of this case still have the right to appeal this decision,” said Saxo Bank team owner Bjarne Riis. He added that the team would continue to do its utmost in the fight against doping.