Olympic archive

Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Barack Obama rule out a boycott of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, insisting that anti-gay prejudice will be better tackled by attending the event.

In 1979 ITN went to Crystal Palace to meet blind sprinter Graham Salmon, who was pioneering a revolutionary bleeper that ensured he did not stray out of his running track.

In 1988 ITN reported from the Sobel Centre in north London – at the time one of the few sports centres in the UK offering facilities for people with disabilities.

The decision of the University of Illinois to pull out of staging the 1984 Paralympics meant Stoke Mandeville had just four months to prepare for the arrival of 1,500 athletes from around the world.

The popularity of the London Marathon, first run in 1981, meant disabled sportspeople were soon lobbying for inclusion in the event, and in 1983 the capital staged the first-ever Wheelchair Marathon.

As English footballers returned from an unofficial tour of apartheid South Africa, disabled protesters were demonstrating against the arrival of the South African team for the Stoke Mandeville Games.

The Fifth International Paralympics were held at Stoke Mandeville in 1956. ITN filmed the opening ceremony – but with no sound. Instead, the presenter read from a script as the images played.

After boxing and taekwondo were contested by women for the first time and women’s football pulled in record crowds, Channel 4 News asks if London 2012 was a turning point for women’s sport.

British horse riders fight off New Zealand and Sweden in equestrian team eventing to finish second behind Germany, securing a second silver medal for Team GB at London 2012.

Moscow’s preparations to host the 1980 Games were well underway when ITN visited the Soviet capital in 1979. But then the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and a US-led Olympic boycott followed.

Two years before the 1980 Games, Scottish sprinter Alan Wells revealed to ITN that his ambition was to prove himself a “reasonable sprinter”. He went on to win gold and silver medals in Moscow.

Swimmer Sharron Davies had already been identified as a medal prospect for the 1980 Moscow Olympics when ITN went to meet her and her trainer at Crystal Palace in 1977.

With the 1976 games only months away, ITN’s Michael Brunson was dispatched to Montreal, where a flight over the Olympic Stadium revealed huge gaps between sections of the building.

As the Olympic torch nears its final lap, communities that welcomed it tell Channel 4 News it has drawn them closer to the event. But writer Iain Sinclair calls the Games a “national hallucination”.

The deaths of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team at the hands of Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Munich Games have overshadowed the security arrangements of every Olympics since.