Highlighted by Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic Daily yesterday, this first-person account of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 is brilliant and hilarious. It was published in 1956, and written by Thomas P. Curtis. It is stuffed full of moments like this:

For the aquatic events we had on our team a very fast short-distance swimmer, who had won many races in warm American swimming pools. He journeyed to the Piraeus on the day of the first swimming competition blissfully ignorant that even the Mediterranean is bitterly cold in the month of April.

He had traveled 5000 miles for this event, and as he posed with the others on the edge of the float, waiting for the gun, his spirit thrilled with patriotism and determination. At the crack of the pistol, the contestants dived headfirst into the icy water. In a split second his head reappeared. “Jesu Christo! I’m freezing!”; with that shriek of astonished frenzy he lashed back to the float. For him the Olympics were over.

It’s well-worth five minutes of your time.

I know nothing about sport, but even I’m aware that England faces Spain in the World Cup Final this morning.

I enjoyed reading the Economist’s Simply Science newsletter on the subject, written by Abby Bertics. I had no idea, for example, that “women still overwhelmingly wear football boots designed for small men, not women.”

But the most interesting part of the article concerned some research by Arve Vorland Pedersen, who proposed several modifications to the game to scale it to the physiological attributes of women, rather than those of men. Women are shorter, for example, so the pitch and goals ought to be smaller. Women should not have to live in a world designed for men.

And yet the kicker, so to speak, came at the end. The average physiological attributes of men at the time the sport’s rules were codified have more in common with the average physiological attributes of today’s women than today’s men. So really, the challenge ought not to be to scale things down for women, but up for men.

In today’s world, football is a women’s game.

I must have walked past this plaque on Osbourne Road in Jesmond tens or hundreds of times, yet never noticed it! Muriel Robb won the 1902 Wimbledon ladies’ single final in a match which was the longest on record at the time, beating Charlotte Sterry.

As Olympic preparations continue apace, the country’s biggest metal Olympic rings have been clamped to the Tyne Bridge to celebrate Newcastle’s status as one of the host cities. They look really quite smart. They are the correct colours, of course, though the contrast with the bright sky in this photo makes that hard to see.

At first glance, from a distance, they didn’t look much different in size to the ones at St Pancras. But closer up, it’s clear that they really are quite huge: 25m wide, in fact, 50% bigger than the ones on The Mound in Edinburgh!

I was at St James’ Park today for a mock exam. Luckily, it didn’t involve any demonstration of footballing skill, otherwise it might have gone rather less well for me.

St James’ Park is, of course, the 52,000 seater home to Newcastle United, now officially called the Sports Direct Arena. Whilst that name is undoubtedly controversial, the old one is more controversial than many people realise. While the stadium’s official name was “St James’ Park” (with an oddly placed apostrophe), both of the local Geordie newspapers refer to it as “St James’s Park”. The nearby Metro station further muddies the waters, with the apostrophe-less name “St James”. And that’s before we even broach the debate about whether there should be a full stop after “St”!