Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, says that the Olympic Games are “in crisis”, admittedly a state that has existed more or less since the modern Games began. Sir Roger Bannister, a man who redefined our vision of human potential, said in this newspaper that the Games will have to change “by evolution or revolution”.

Meanwhile the extraordinary alliance that has sustained the Olympics since the - revolutionary - Games of 1984 appears to be fraying. Multinational capitalism and rampant nationalism seem to be parting company as Coca-Cola, Samsung and Lenovo, the Olympic sponsors, scale down their involvement with the calamitously compromised torch relay.

Bannister suggests that the Games themselves be scaled down, to put their staging in reach of smaller nations. Not a bad idea, but what are the criteria for downsizing? The usual notion is cost, pure and simple, and this strikes me as morally wrong-headed. The Games are about more than dollars.

The Olympics are about the summit of summits, the champion of champions, the elite of the elite. Every Olympic event should be won by the greatest exponent of the art that the world can produce. Every Olympic gold medal must be the holy grail of its sport; the prize that makes all other prizes insignificant.

So we must work out which sports have not monetary but true Olympic value; which are those of the Olympic Heartland. Look at every sport and if it has a bigger prize than an Olympic gold medal, fling it out.

Perhaps they have already started to do this. After the Games this year, baseball and softball will be chucked out. The biggest prize in baseball is the World Series, Olympic baseball is just an audition for the Major Leagues. It had to go, and here are the sports that should follow:

Basketball. the sport's biggest prize is the NBA championship in the United States.

Boxing. Amir Khan preferred pro boxing to a tilt for gold in Beijing.

Football. What's an under-23 tournament got to do with excellence? The World Cup is what counts.

Tennis. A singles grand-slam tournament is the ultimate prize.

That leaves us with such heartland sports as handball, wrestling, modern pentathlon, along, obviously, with swimming, athletics and gymnastics. We can keep acceptable innovations such as triathlon and beach volleyball. We can even keep the events-within-sports that some of us find a bit silly: synchronised swimming and (sorry, Gabby Logan) rhythmic gymnastics.

That would mean retaining expensive sports such as equestrianism and yachting. But these are heartland sports. For Zara Phillips, the world and former European three-day eventing champion, an Olympic gold remains the ultimate goal. Any sport in which an Olympic medal is second best has to go. Am I right, Sir Rodge?

No room for men of gloom

Brian Ashton took the England rugby union team to second place in the World Cup and RBS Six Nations Championship. As a result, he has been sacked; those few that speak up for him do so with the knowledge that they are swimming against the tide. But it was not Ashton's results that were calamitous, it was the manner of them. Perhaps it comes down to Ashton himself: the way he presented himself, the fact that he lacks the personality required to create a thrilling narrative out of narrow - but hardly unlucky - failure.

Avram Grant looks as if he will take Chelsea to second place in the Barclays Premier League and quite possibly second in the Champions League. Yet opinion suggests that Grant will have to go the way of Ashton after the narrowest of failures and not for the failures themselves.

If the Chelsea first-team coach goes, it will be because he is not much fun. Because he doesn't work as a character in the narrative of his side. Because he is a gloomy bugger. José Mourinho is still regarded as a genius, but that is not because his results were better by a distance. It is because he was more fun. Ashton has gone, and Grant may follow, and both for being gloomy buggers. If you thought the whole point of sport was that all achievements are quantifiable and all conclusions objective, think again.

Arsenal can only enjoy the view

How do long-term Arsenal fans cope? Are their heads spinning from the requirement to hold so many contradictory ideas in their heads? For years, during the times of George Graham, they believed that beauty is in the scoreline, that 1-0 represented a glorious minimalism, that to devote even an instant of time to any notion other than pure victory was a betrayal of the players, of supporters, of sport itself.

Now they must play the part of Leonard Cohen's beautiful losers, claiming that the destination is less important than the journey, that sport has an aesthetic; that it is more glorious to lose with Arsenal than to win with anyone else. Both of these are tenable positions, but to hold such extreme views in such quick succession requires an extraordinary philosophical agility.

Flintoff six appeal goes missing

What are we going to do about Number Six? That was the perennial question of that great Sixties serial, The Prisoner, which is being reshown for those adept with a zapper. Andrew Flintoff begins yet another comeback and Duncan Fletcher, England's former coach, is saying that he can no longer be considered a Test No6.

The more he has worked on his rehab as a bowler, the more his batting has gone downhill. Last week's 23 for Lancashire was of the kind technically known as a cameo. (Why? The Shorter Oxford says a cameo is “a precious stone ... having two layers of different colours, in the upper of which is a figure carved in relief, while the lower serves as a ground.”) Flintoff's mature innings of 2005 have been replaced by a kind of block'n'biff strategy that owes nothing to the quality of ball or bowler. Ah, sweet Fred of 2005, shall we ever see his like again?

IPL hits tradition for six

The Indian Premier League (IPL) is learning a strange truth, one learnt by, among others, Robert Maxwell (remember the Thames Valley Royals?), Milton Keynes Dons and the men behind the various attempts to turn Europe into a hotbed of American football: that in most sporting cultures, you need a sense of tradition and a sense of meaning before you can support a team with your heart. The IPL has staked its millions on the assumption that middle-class Indians feel a tribal association with the cities they live in. That seems a very large assumption.