Tokyo's announcement over the weekend that it will bid for the 2020 Olympics is intended to show the world it can recover and stage a successful Games after the devastation caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the National Basketball Association (NBA) announced that former NBA player Sam Vincent and WNBA Legend Andrea Stinson will travel as sports envoys to Jordan from July 17-22. Vincent and Stinson will conduct six youth basketball clinics, work with disabled athletes, and meet with Jordanian sports officials.

It's not size of your sports diplomacy that matters, it's what you do with it. This is why we can all learn a lesson from Sarandon, who at 64 has lost neither her looks nor her charm, when she informs the audience today that she is "a ping-pong propagandist" - while flashing a beautiful smile.

The link between football, identity, unity and nationhood is so strong that many newly-found states, or states divided by war, have used the soft power of football to achieve hard political aim.

But Brody, now a 68-year-old grandfather, hasn’t stopped representing Israel in the international arena. After embarking on a successful career as an insurance agent for many years, the tall, trim former star has embarked on what he calls his “third career”- advocacy for Israel.

Sports diplomacy. This term typically brings to mind images of athletes in action, engaging young and old on their field of play, sharing not only their prowess in sport, but their cultures and values. In Zimbabwe, American soccer player-turned-administrator Jon McCullough gave new meaning to sports diplomacy, trading in cleats for loafers, jerseys for business suits, and playbooks for PowerPoint.

Canadian media mogul Sidney Greenberg has set his sights on using sports as public diplomacy for Israel. Today, he is the financial force behind the Canada-Israel Hockey School in Metulla, which grew from a struggling program at the rink with 30 local participants, to a flourishing after-school program for 300 Druse and Israeli students across the Golan.

On Friday at the Nixon Library in California, Braithwaite played against Liang Geliang, a Chinese Ping Pong player who was one of the Chinese team members in Japan for the historical table tennis competition in 1971. The two of them had a rematch 40 years later.