Nick D'Arcy and Alberto Contador. (Getty Images)

The great 18th century poet Alexander Pope famously said “to err is human; to forgive, divine”. But as far as Anthony Tan is concerned, forgiveness should only come by way of remorse.

It’s the lack of contrition that I have the biggest issue with. Everyone I know has the same issue.Kieren Perkins, gold medallist in the 1,500-metre freestyle at the 1992 and 1996 Olympic Games, said as much in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Good Weekend’ magazine a few weeks back. And I couldn’t agree more.In case you’ve been living under a rock, D’Arcy assaulted Cowley, a Commonwealth Games triple gold medallist, at a Sydney bar in March 2008, the day D’Arcy learned he was part of the team for the Olympic Games in Beijing. The king-hit was so severe Cowley required multiple rounds of facial reconstruction, with fractures to his jaw, eye socket, hard palate, cheekbone and nose, and on 21 April, D’Arcy pleaded guilty to one charge of recklessly inflicting grievous bodily harm. Three days before, on 18 April, he was dropped from Australian team for the Beijing Games for bringing the team into disrepute, a decision twice appealed by D’Arcy to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) but which he lost on both counts.

In March 2009, D’Arcy received a jail sentence of 14 months and 12 days, suspended on condition of good behaviour. Cowley sued for damages resulting from the incident, where last year, a civil court judge ordered D’Arcy to pay Cowley more than $370,000 in damages and costs, but D’Arcy declared himself bankrupt.

It prompted speculation Swimming Australia would declare him ineligible to compete at this year’s Games in London on grounds he had failed to meet certain behavioural and ethical standards required of team members. Cowley, however, claims a secret deal was struck with Swimming Australia chief executive, Kevin Neil, and D’Arcy to reinstate him back in the national team before he declared bankruptcy. Swimming Australia has denied any such deal took place, even though a 23 April statement by the national governing body spoke of “an agreement that all parties were satisfied with” and decided “that the referral to the judiciary committee is no longer required”, inexplicably shelving a judiciary committee inquiry into D’Arcy’s behaviour.

Jack Bobridge and Michael Hepburn are just two of a new generation of young talent riding for gold in London.

The strength of Australia's Olympic track cycling team is not reflected in the names that will be going to London, impressive as they are, but rather those that won't writes Al Hinds.

The depth of the greater squad, which will see a host of former track world champions not in the final team, demonstrates the huge transformation Australia has undergone since the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

Then - High Performance Director Shayne Bannan was caught between a rock and a hard place assembling his Olympic track team - with a huge gulf between expectations, and available talent.

The endurance squads for both men and women were approaching their twilights, with the likes of Graeme Brown and Luke Roberts presences in the team a throwback to Australia's strong showing at Athens 2004.

Using a mattock [a soil loosening instrument], I reckon, is a young person’s game. Well, it’s more suited to a younger bloke than me. I knew that before the water started pouring into the shed. I knew that last summer when my ambition to bury 100 metres of irrigation pipe ended up with about 20 metres under the ground and the rest kept cool by a simple covering of hay. And I knew it when it starting chucking rain again last week, and I had 20 metres of ag-pipe to lay, to run water away from the shed. Twenty metres, and a good 30cm deep trench to dig, to be sure the water would flow downhill.

Luckily, a younger bloke was there. Phil, my trusty sidekick, is faster than me with a mattock, and stronger than me with a spade. So a long, narrow, water-draining trench now stretches the length of our hay shed, protecting my tools, saving the hay, and leaving blisters where some fairly meek callouses once stood. What looked like a simple job for a couple of hours consumed the better part of our day, and the quoll’s share of my energy.

Winter, it seems, is coming fast to the farms. The south-facing paddocks at Puggle Farm are now mossy once again. At the big farm, they’re grassy but sodden. A bit over 200mm of rain over the last couple of weeks has sealed it. We won’t be dry again, not totally dry on that side of the property, until October. I don’t like driving on the paddocks too much, and at this time of year all, I leave is two trenches, deeper than one the ag-pipe lays in.

With an unemployment rate of just over 15 per cent and an economy expected to contract by 2 and a half per cent this year Portugal's economic woes mirror that of much of Europe.

To find out more about how the Portuguese are coping with the government's austerity measures, and for his take on the Greek economic crisis, Ricardo Goncalves spoke with Portuguese President, Anibal Cavaco Silva in this SBS World News Australia exclusive interview.

A new book salutes the talented Australian men and women behind the camera lens. 

Australia has consistently punched above its weight in producing world-class actors and directors but our talented cinematographers rarely receive similar recognition.

Filmmaker Martha Ansara estimates as many as 40 Aussie cinematographers are working overseas in films, TV, documentaries and commercials at any given time. Yet we usually hear about their exploits only when they win or are nominated for Academy Awards. Among the Oscar honourees are Dean Semler (Dances with Wolves, 1990), John Seale (The English Patient, 1996), Andrew Lesnie (Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001), Russell Boyd (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, 2003) and Dion Beebe (Memoirs of a Geisha, 2006).

The ‘unsung heroes’ finally get their due in Ansara’s book The Shadowcatchers: a history of cinematography in Australia, published by the Australian Cinematographers Society. The tome is being launched by director Bruce Beresford at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School on May 31.

Epic ... Joaquim Rodriguez and winner Ryder Hesjedal duelled relentlessly in this year's Giro (Getty Images)

The 2012 edition of the Giro di'Italia will go down as one of the best.

It had everything you'd come to expect in a Grand Tour, and everything that should attract a new generation of cycling fans.

Race director Michele Acquarone passed the test of putting on a world class sporting event with flying colours, and all in his first year on the job.

He gave the world a three-week epic that delivered as a spectacle in every aspect.

Zach Galifiankis lands the long-desired role of a dunce, director Paul Feig goes from bridesmaids to buddy cops, while Natalie Portman heads West for Lynne Ramsey.

What with Walter Salles’ adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road debuting at the Cannes Film Festival this week, 2012 may turn out to be the year that various supposedly unfilmable books end up on the big screen. Another mythic translation that is suddenly on the go is John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, which was posthumously published in 1980 – 11 years after the author committed suicide – and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. From its earliest notices the novel, about an overweight, 30something slob in 1960s New Orleans named Ignatius J. Reilly who is sent forth by his mother to find employment, has attracted filmmakers and then disappointed them.

Harold Ramis and John Belushi looked at shooting an adaptation 1982, while subsequent actors of a certain size who were tied to the project included John Goodman, John Candy and Philip Seymour Hoffman; at one point John Waters wanted to cast his cross-dressing star Divine in the lead role. Steven Soderbergh worked on an off for years on an adaptation, and it almost got made in 2005 with David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls, Pineapple Express) directing Will Ferrell and Lily Tomlin as the Reilly’s.

With the book firmly established as a modern American classic, the movie may finally be on track, with oddball comic Zach Galifiankis (pictured) likely to play Ignatius for director James Bobin, who directed the recent Muppets revival and episodes of Flight of the Conchords before that. This could turn out to be a fine use of Galifianakis, especially since he’s already committed to going around a third time as part of The Hangover franchise. Come August Galifianakis is in The Campaign, playing one of two idiotic American political candidates opposite Will Ferrell, before starring in Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s first feature, You Are Here, with Owen Wilson and Amy Poehler.

Mark Cavendish (R) is intent on making it to the finish of the Giro d'Italia in Milan (AAP Images)

What exactly are the future plans of World Road Champion Mark Cavendish as he struggles through the mountains to complete the Giro d'Italia?

The question among commentators is this; why exactly is Cavendish so determined to make it to Milan? And how does that determination affect his plans for the Tour de France and later on at the Olympic road race, where he is a burning hot home ground favourite for the gold?

And lets not forget that with every passing day in the Giro d'Italia grupetto, Cavendish spends a few valuable chips that could be useful at the Tour de France.

Earlier this year when Cavendish first signed on with Team Sky it was said by team directors they would approach the Tour de France with the difficult goal of winning both the Yellow and Green jerseys, a task last completed in 1997 by Team Telekom's Jan Ullrich and Eric Zabel.

As the Cannes Film Festival passes the half-way point, we ponder the merits of competitors for the Palme d'Or. 

When you’re watching up to five films each day at a festival, your mind can play tricks when you reflect back on what you’ve seen. There’s great risk of plotlines converging if you don’t hastily scrawl notes in the dark.

I wonder if the Cannes jury has the same problem? Let’s hope pen torches are produced at Jury screenings, lest Nanni Moretti, Diane Kruger, Ewan McGregor et al, lose track of which film had the tissue-papered bag of testicles in it… (‘Was that the one that also had the dead dog in the garden?,” a flummoxed Jean-Paul Gaultier might enquire during deliberations. ‘And correct me if I’m wrong, but that nice old lady who died in the Haneke film… Brad Pitt shot her, oui?’)

Okay, perhaps not (none of those moments are easily forgotten). Either way, they have less than a week now to confer about it, now that the Official Competition has just crossed the mid-way point. So here’s a précis of the good, the bad… and the grisly (there has been much, much blood spilt on screen this week), of those in the race for the Palme d’Or.

Peter Sagan won five stages of this year's Amgen Tour of California. It could've been six, but for Sylvain Georges.

Too hard, or not hard enough? Depending on who you talk to about the Amgen Tour of California the answers vary.

One thing's for sure, the race was far from easy. This was the toughest course and the most competitive field we've had, and the riders all rose to the occasion. It was a race right to the finish for every stage this year.Any suggestion that tougher is necessarily equivalent to better however should be tempered. We saw at the 2011 Giro d'Italia that sprinkling in mountain top finishes like hundreds and thousands, doesn't add to the spectacle of the race. Anthony Tan put it best in a blog earlier this year when he said:

"La Corsa Rosa turned into a freak show, as the race took on an increasingly farcical nature to meet the megalomaniacal standards of Zomegnan."

Harder is fine, but it shouldn't be relied upon to make a race more interesting or entertaining; lets leave the Dr Zomegnan freak shows to the circus.