The British Government approved the sale of almost 200 school playing-fields in the decade after 1997. Or, put another way, one every two and a half weeks. In the same period, there were also more than 1,300 sales of parts of schools' sites to developers.

At the beginning of 2008, Paris, the capital city of France, possessed one more 50-metre swimming pool than the entire United Kingdom put together.

The UK School Games is a multi-sport event for the country's elite athletes of school age. The nine sports included in the four-day Games, which take place every year, are athletics, badminton, fencing, gymnastics, hockey, judo, swimming, table tennis and volleyball. An integrated programme of disability events in athletics, swimming and table tennis means that more than 1,500 athletes compete at the Games.

Joe Kent's winning leap of 2.02 metres in the men's high jump event at the 2008 UK School Games would have been good enough to earn him a gold medal at the 1948 London Olympics. Katarina Thompson's winning leap of 1.78 metres in the women's high jump competition would not only have secured her a gold medal at the 1948 Olympics, but at the two subsequent Olympics of 1952 and 1956 as well.

Be Number 1's Madeleine Mann won the 100 metres and 200 metres sprints at the IAPS National Athletics Competition in both 2007 and 2008. At the 2007 meeting, she broke an under-12 national record that had stood since 1993 when she won a 100 metres heat in a time of 13.7.

In England, around 70 per cent of teenage girls do not engage in any form of sporting activity after leaving school, whereas in France the same proportion carry on with at least one sport.

Almost a quarter of a million aspiring gymnasts are stuck on club waiting lists in Britain, because of a lack of capacity in current facilities.

At the time of the 2008 Olympic Games, eight English counties and the entire city of Birmingham did not possess a single publicly accessible diving board over a metre high. In 1978, England alone had 298 publicly accessible pools with diving boards. By 2008, there were just 84 in the whole of Britain.

To lessen the risk of future back injuries in particular, the England and Wales Cricket Board have fast-bowling directives in place for youth cricketers. Under-13 fast bowlers are allowed to bowl a maximum of four overs in a spell and eight overs during the course of a day while under-14s and under-15s are limited to five overs in a spell and 10 overs in a day. By a similar token, under-16s and under 17s are limited to six overs per spell and 18 overs in a day while under 18s and under 19s can send down no more than seven overs in a spell and 21 overs in a day.

At the age of 14 years and 81 days, diver Tom Daley became the second-youngest British male Olympian ever when he competed at the 2008 Beijing Games in China. The youngest British male to have competed in the Olympics remains Kenneth Lester, who was 13 years and 144 days old when he participated as a rowing cox at the 1960 Rome Games in Italy.

The youngest British Olympian ever was Cecilia Colledge, who was 11 years and 73 days old when she competed in women's figure skating at the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, USA. She is also the youngest person from any country to have competed at a Winter Olympics. Britain's youngest competitor at a Summer Olympics is swimmer Margery Hinton, who took part in the 1928 Amsterdam Games in Holland at the age of 13 years and 43 days.

Ellie Simmonds, who was born with achondroplasia - or dwarfism - became Britain's youngest ever individual gold medallist at either the Olympics or the Paralympics when she won the 100m freestyle swimming event at the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing at the age of 13 years and 301 days.

A strange occurrence came to pass in the coxed pairs rowing final at the 1900 Paris Olympics, where a small French boy was drafted in at the last moment to cox the Dutch crew, who believed that their existing cox was too heavy, to a gold medal. The name and age of the boy, who disappeared without trace soon after the race, were never recorded, though he might have been as young as seven years old.

The youngest known Olympic competitor, and indeed the youngest known Olympic medallist, was Dimitrios Loundras, a Greek gymnast, who won a bronze medal in the team event at the 1896 Games in Athens, Greece when he was just 10 years and 218 days old.

Nadia Comaneci, a Romanian gymnast, was only 14 years old when she won five medals (three gold, one silver and one bronze) at the 1976 Montreal Olympics in Canada - a Games at which she also became the first person ever to be awarded a perfect score of 10 in an Olympic gymnastics event. Trained as a gymnast since the age of six, the 4ft 11in Comaneci made history by being awarded a magical 10 for her performances on the uneven bars and on the balance beam in the team competition. She also gained another five "perfect 10s" at the 1976 Games en route to winning individual gold medals in the all-around, uneven bars and balance beam events before winning four further medals (two gold and two silver) at the Moscow Olympics in the Soviet Union four years later. Comaneci retired from competition in 1981 and became a naturalized citizen of the USA.

Comaneci's achievements of 1976 would not be possible in the current era, because Olympic gymnastics events now have a minimum age limit of 16 years. Olympic diving events, for their part, have a lower age limit of 14.

Louis Smith was 19 years old when he finished third in the pommel horse event at the 2008 Beijing Olympics to become the first Briton to win an individual Olympic gymnastics medal for 100 years.

Bob Mathias, from the United States, was 17 years and 263 days old when he won the decathlon title at the 1948 London Olympics. He later acted in four films, one of them with Jayne Mansfield, and became a US Congressman.

Yoshinori Sakai, the student who lit the Olympic Flame at the 1964 Tokyo Games in Japan, was born near Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 - the very day the atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city.