I was born in Brazil and lived there until I was 13 years old. If you have never been to Brazil during World Cup time, it will be hard for you to envision what it’s like. The collective mind of a nation stops dead on its track, and 200 million fans (we say the national squad has 200 million coaches) put on their yellow jerseys and pray our squad will bring us glory.

Jessica Lopez, a four-year old with a shy smile, has suffered severe chronic asthma attacks since she was born. Her condition always worsened in the fall, when dust rose up from the abandoned fields that bordered her family’s modest one-room house.

The 2014 Winter Olympic games begin in a little less than a month at the time of writing this article. They will be located in Sochi, Russia, which is a tiny Russian resort town on the Black Sea. Also this year, the 2014 World Cup kicks off this June. It will take place across Brazil in a multitude of cities across the country. Both of these events are significant because they are two of the largest (if not the largest) worldwide sport events.

With the current cloud of anti-Semitic allegations hovering over football, Fifa must be praying that Israel do not qualify for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. For hard on the heels of the disturbing concerns over excessive heat, homophobia and mass deaths of migrant construction workers comes an incident at the recent Swimming World Cup in the capital Doha when the Qatari hosts refused to display the name “Israel” during TV broadcasts and removed Israeli flags from outside the venue.

He can still dunk like a butterfly, but in the personally tragic case of former basketball pro Dennis Rodman in North Korea, the embrace of Kim Jong Un and his policies sting like a bee. Rodman is only the most recent example of sports diplomacy gone awry. And with the Sochi Olympics a few weeks away, it is inevitable that a new cadre of unpredictable athlete diplomats will make it to center stage.

The 24/7 Olympic news cycle is consumed right now, and understandably, with security issues for the forthcoming Winter Games in Sochi. Then, too, there are the construction woes over the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, where the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, is paying a visit this week.