From the beaches of South Africa, the mountains of Europe to the spiritual headquarters of Australian sport, it's been a full-time job keeping up with all the stories and shenanigans - at least that's what my expenses will say this week.

If someone had told Carlton staff they'd be playing in Melbourne on a Friday night when the MCG would attract 99,382 spectators and they'd register as many goals as the headline act, they would have been delighted.

However, those four goals came from Real Madrid seeing off alternative Blues outfit Man City in a soccer friendly, while just 26,815 were watching Hawthorn inflict Carlton's biggest-ever defeat across town at Etihad Stadium.

If that 138-point margin represented the most emphatic victory of the week, the classiest would have to go to Chris Froome.

Even as US President Barack Obama toured his ancestral homeland, Froome still presented a compelling case to be the planet's most famous Kenyan descendant by surviving the seemingly endless attacks of both rivals and accusers to win his second Tour de France.

The Nairobi-born, South African-raised, Monaco-based Brit has been a model of restraint and decorum for the past three weeks, despite being showered as much in spittle as champagne for his efforts.

The legacy of Lance Armstrong and his many partners in crime appears to be that the achievements of Froome and his like will be forever doubted by an understandably suspicious public.

The 30-year-old seems destined to spend his career struggling to overcome a challenge every bit as exhausting as anything the Alps could throw at him.

Froome once asked his loyal Tasmanian sidekick Richie Porte if he had ever Googled him. When Porte asked why, Froome told him to try it. The answer remains to this day.

Type "Chris Froome" into Google and the first suggested search you get offered is "doping". The more predictable "bike" crosses the line a distant fourth.

Given such public suspicion - demonstrated with far less subtlety by the urine and spit launched at him by cowardly spectators - Froome could be forgiven for being bitter, but instead presented a picture of diplomacy the equal of Obama atop the Champs-Elysees podium.

And just when television sports fans think they might return to a sleeping pattern bearing some vague resemblance to normality, the third Ashes Test is about to get under way.

The dramatic turnaround between the first and second Tests left more than just Australian opener Chris Rogers in a daze and suggest the outcome of the series is rather less predictable than Friday night's AFL fixture.

The week's sporting headlines have been made much further afield than simply on the intended arena.

Sharks have barely been out of the news. After one survived an encounter with Australian surfing world champ Mick Fanning, two more - Cronulla brothers Andrew and David Fifita - were given a 12-month ban from Penrith junior league matches for abusing officials.

Meanwhile, Robert Allenby's former caddie lined him up nicely for the Kenrick Monk Award for Made-up Stories by suggesting the golfer's claims about being abducted and beaten up in Hawaii were a cover for him being "s---faced drunk".

But just as sport seemed to have developed a monopoly on sensational stories, politics hit back with footage of the head of Britain's House of Lords conduct committee snorting cocaine with prostitutes.

Hard to see whether sport can trump that, although David Warner and Joe Root are being reunited on Wednesday.