In the run up to the Beijing Olympics, Matt McGrath sets out to expose corruption, drug use and cover-ups at the highest levels in sport. BBC World Service Investigation

On 23 April 2008 the House of Commons Select Committee responsible for reviewing the performance of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport published its report London 2012 Games: The next lap. This report contains the following judgements.

.."such a radical revision of cost estimates has been damaging to confidence in the management of the overall programme. It has also exposed the Government and Games organisers to the charge that the initial bid was kept artificially low in order to win public support."

Sportsmen and women may not be renowned for being politically outspoken. The most notorious example of pressure being applied to British sportsmen was in 1938 when the English football team was ordered by the FA and the Foreign Office to give the Nazi salute before a friendly match in Germany.

The Badminton World Federation (BWF) awarded England the 19th World Championships and the event will come to the capital just a year before the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

The bid has received strong financial backing from UK Sport’s World Class Events Programme and has also been supported by the Sports Minister, Gerry Sutcliffe MP, The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone and London 2012 Chairman Lord Coe.

Not since a group of anarchists first started holding meetings has there been such a crisis of faith for a community. Recently, the men in suits of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) proposed turning skateboarding into an Olympic sport for the London Olympics of 2012.

A material difference may be observed in the games of antiquity: the most eminent of the Greeks were actors, the Romans were merely spectators.

The Olympic stadium was open to wealth, merit, and ambition; and if the candidates could depend on their personal skill and activity, they might pursue the footsteps of Diomede and Menelaus, and conduct their own horses in the rapid career.

The English may be obsessed with sport - but for half of the population that does not go beyond picking up the remote control.

A study of nearly 364,000 people in every corner of the country, commissioned by Sport England, reveals half of the population are doing no exercise at all.

Forced removal - population displacements

East London faces the break up of the largest concentration of amateur football pitches in Europe (home to the Hackney and Leyton Sunday League), relocation of a local cycle track, running and walking routes. There will be displacement of other uses, including three Travellers' settlements, artists' studios, and Clays Lane Peabody Estate (formerly Clays Lane Housing Co-operative, now managed by Community Based Housing Association [CBHA]). Over 400 University of East London students, also based at Clays Lane, were evicted by the University in advance of the bid decision in July, many in the throes of their exams. The impact of relocation on firms in the Lower Lea Valley is considered in Section 2.2 below.