Bahrain's withdrawal has presented Formula One with a dilemma.

So, the Formula One season will now start in Melbourne, Australia, on March 27th. As Red Bull's Aussie driver Mark Webber put it: "Back to the good old days."

Australia has become used to kicking off the annual Formula One circus since 1996, but the emergence of a new track in Bahrain, whose backers have seemingly bottomless pockets, changed all that.

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Posted by: CNN World Sport Anchor, Don Riddell
Filed under: Motorsport

Tiger Woods, right, lost to Graeme McDowell in a playoff at the charity tournament he hosts. (AFP/Getty Images)

CNN's World Sport will be broadcasting its predictions for 2011 in upcoming shows between December 31-January 2. In the fourth of a series of preview blogs, Don Riddell takes a look at Tiger Woods' chances of becoming a major force in golf again.

When someone dominates a sport, the question is not so much will they win major tournaments, but how many. For the last decade, that has been the question for Tiger Woods every season: will it be one, two, three or all four? The smart money used to be reserved for at least two of those career-defining golf trophies. At his peak, barely anyone else got a look-in. How things have changed.

You’d never have thought that a run of top-15 finishes would have been positive for Woods, but such were the depths that the former world number one plumbed in 2010, a run of such results was good news.

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Posted by: CNN World Sport Anchor, Don Riddell
Filed under: Golf

Champions all. 2008 and 09 F1 title winners Hamilton and Button celebrate with Vettel.

Fernando Alonso might have been going for a third F1 championship, and it was well within his grasp. But he was almost a forgotten man at the finish in Abu Dhabi.

A disastrous race meant that the Spaniard trailed home in a useless seventh place, and as the 2008 champion Lewis Hamilton and the '09 winner Jensen Button sprayed a delirious Sebastian Vettel with champagne, Alonso's last title ('06) must have felt like a long time ago.

It has been a spectacular sporting year for Spain, but this one eluded them. And while Spaniards and Ferrari fanatics will be crushed, few others will have sympathy for a driver and a team that many said cheated its way to the top of the standings.

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Posted by: CNN World Sport Anchor, Don Riddell
Filed under: Motorsport

Hunter Mahan fights back the tears after the U.S. team lose on a dramatic final day against Europe.

Celtic Manor, Wales (CNN) A week that started with everyone sheltering from the pouring rain, ended with a European team being showered with champagne.

This was one of the tightest ever Ryder Cups and the nail-biting drama re-affirmed the event as one of the best competitions in team sport.

But in sport every story has two sides, for every champion there is a defeated opponent, for every figure who grabs glory there is another who must deal with despair - and very often the margins between the embrace of victory and the cold, company of failure is slim.

And so it was that while the European team were posing for their winning photos, the Americans were sitting before the press, trying to put a brave face on what had been a crushing loss.

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Posted by: CNN World Sport Anchor, Don Riddell
Filed under: Golf

A rain-drenched Ryder Cup in the Welsh resort of Celtic Manor.

Nick Faldo didn’t get much right when Europe lost the Ryder Cup two years ago, but he was spot-on when he said of the next match in Wales "bring your waterproofs".

I stood out and watched the opening tee shots this morning and, within minutes, I was absolutely drenched. Even my waterproofs were of minimal protection. My phone short-circuited with all rain pouring off my hands and I’ve spent the afternoon jostling with other journalists to hang my jacket in front of the hot-air blowers in the media center.

The conditions were inconvenient for the American players too. So inadequate was their wet-weather clothing that PGA officials were forced to rush into the merchandise tent to purchase proper gear for their men. The problem was fixed, but it was surely a blow a to team morale.

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Posted by: CNN World Sport Anchor, Don Riddell
Filed under: Golf

Pakistan's cricket team has been engulfed by accusations that some of their players are involved in a betting scam.

The allegations are damning, and the evidence of match-fixing produced by the British newspaper The News of The World could be devastating for the sport in Pakistan, where cricket is an obsession and a way of life.

That their players – their heroes, their icons – may have been involved in such a monumental scandal will be hard to swallow. That would be true at the best of times, but especially now, with Pakistan grappling with catastrophic flooding and a destabilizing terrorist insurgency.

The ray of hope and inspiration the players could have provided in the overseas Test series against England has been dramatically extinguished. The team was thrashed by their hosts, and have been publicly humiliated.

Many sports can be the victims of match-fixing, especially in the era of spread-betting where pundits can gamble on anything from the winner to the tiniest details of a match. Cricket is especially vulnerable, and it has been tarnished often in the past. Pakistan cricket has been faced with such allegations since the 1990s and already this year, several serious claims - yet to be proved - have been made.

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Posted by: CNN World Sport Anchor, Don Riddell
Filed under: Cricket