THE largest collection of British Olympians will gather today at London’s Festival Hall to mark the 100th anniversary of the British Olympic Association. Everyone who has represented Great Britain was on the guest list and some 600 Olympians are expected, including three from the 1936 Berlin Olympics and Geoffrey Colyer, a canoeist from 1952, who is flying from Australia.

Among the best represented sports will be rowing, which brings into light one of the most notable of today’s absentees, Andy Holmes, the double gold medal-winner and pre-Matthew Pinsent team-mate of Steve Redgrave. Holmes’s disappearance from the sporting horizon has not simply been a case of losing touch; it has been an intentional vanishing act.

At the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, the first in which Pinsent filled his seat, Holmes was staying a few miles from the rowing venue but did not go to watch. He has been invited to partake in reunions ever since but has studiously declined.

Much has been made of a supposed antipathy between Holmes and Redgrave and although Redgrave has acknowledged that they were very different personalities and never friends off the water, he has insisted that the pair were not enemies. Holmes was given the choice as a teenager between rowing and his other passion, playing the drums, and, once said, “like an idiot I stayed with the sport”. He has returned to music, although his occupation is with a furniture removals company on the South Coast.

So complete has been his detachment from sport that his daughter discovered that she had a famous dad only when she was flicking through a Ladybird book about the Olympics at her school. When challenged, Holmes acknowledged his previous life and retrieved his medals from a hidden corner at the top of his house.

His daughter would not be the first rowing progeny to discover late that they had Olympic ancestry. One forerunner to Redgrave and Holmes in the coxless pair was a certain William Laurie, who, with his best friend, John Wilson, returned from the Colonial Service in Sudan in 1948 after ten years out of a boat and won gold. But Laurie did not tell his son, Hugh, the actor/comedian who was a half-decent rower himself. “I only got it out of my father by accident,” Hugh said, “when he was very old.”

Robot dog football? It’s a barking mad, mad, mad world

WORRYING news has reached us from the RoboCup US Open in Atlanta, Georgia, which threatens the entire future of football.

The RoboCup is robot dog soccer, technology for which is improving so fast that the long-term goal of fielding a robot dog team good enough to play a human team by 2050 is beginning to look possible. “We want to play the best humans versus the best robots,” Alan Wagner, a doctoral student in computer science and artificial intelligence at Georgia Tech, told this column.

Robodog football is a four-a-side game. The dogs search for the ball with the cameras in their noses, chase it and communicate with wireless technology.

An acknowledged weakness is their lack of emotion, but Wagner said that “it is at least conceivable that researchers will learn to model emotion and personality”, which carries the intriguing possibility of Graham Poll getting the full blast from Wayne Rooney in one ear and a monotone, four-letter robodog tirade in the other.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the market leaders in the robodog world are Germany. The RoboCup was won by Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, but a German team invited to play exhibition matches went undefeated.

“It should be noted,” Wagner said, “that one of the German team leaders is Italian.” Which suggests that they are already working on their defence. Should we be concerned? Wagner said that a worse threat comes from another traditional sporting rival, Australia, twice robodog world champions.

A good week for:

Eric Cantona, who led France to glory in Fifa’s inaugural Beach Football World Cup on the sands of Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana. After victory over Portugal in the final, Cantona declared the win to be “great news for beach soccer in general”. Romário, whose Brazil team finished third, did not appear to agree.

A bad week for:

1. Real Madrid. The dangerously overweight, detox-clinic regular Diego Maradona has designs on becoming their coach.

2. Ronaldo. As if the Maradona news was not bad enough, rumours are that the gap-toothed galáctico’s second marriage, to Daniella Cicarelli, the MTV Brazil presenter, is over after three months. Spanish gossip columns reveal that Cicarelli has been trying to widen that gap and that her projectiles of choice have been mobile phones and a DVD player.

3. Monica Bellucci, the film star, when the Italian press revealed that her breasts had less value than the kneecaps of Adriano, the Inter Milan forward. A study of Italian celebrity insurance policies apparently shows that Adriano’s knees are worth £10 million, that the wrists of Valentino Rossi, the MotoGP world champion, are worth £9 million and that Bellucci’s breasts are, by comparison, fairly inconsequential.