This week Mike Edwards explains why, as sports fans around the world tune in to watch the Six Nations and the Winter Olympics, he struggles to work up the same enthusiasm...

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Maybe it is because of the school I went to, the university where I studied and the places where I have lived, but I have never been a fan of rugby.

And although I worked in Switzerland for a time and loved ski-ing, I wouldn’t waste my time following the sport.

So forgive me if I don’t get remotely excited about the Six Nations or the Winter Olympics.

Although I do like rugby’s idea of dissent shown to the referee resulting in the ball being placed 10 metres closer to the culprit’s goal line and a booking offence getting the guilty party 10 minutes in the sin bin.

Introduce those rules to football and the odious diving and feigning injury and backchatting the ref would disappear in an instant. Come on, FIFA, do it.

The farce of the Olympics is manifest from the selection of the host city to the Games’ closing ceremony.

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When professional athletes began to take part, it lost all patina of the Corinthian spirit upheld by proper Olympians like Eric Liddell, Jesse Owens and Kip Keino – and when ridiculous activities (I won’t grace them with the title ‘sports’) like beach volleyball and BMX biking became Olympian, I switched off altogether.

And don’t get me started on the doping. That a 15 year-old figure skater (Katerina Valieva, above right) fails a drug test, uses the vapid ‘visiting Salisbury Cathedral’ excuse of her sample being contaminated by her grandfather’s heart medication, and is then, astonishingly, allowed to continue to compete, is risible beyond the point of no return.

How people get excited about these set-piece events has astounded me for decades.

I only took an interest in Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games in 2014 because I was covering it as a journalist and I had to.