We prove several results concerning the existence of surfaces of section for the geodesic flows of closed orientable Riemannian surfaces. The surfaces of section $\Sigma $ that we construct are either Birkhoff sections, which means that they intersect every sufficiently long orbit segment of the geodesic flow, or at least they have some hyperbolic components in $\partial \Sigma $ as limit sets of the orbits of the geodesic flow that do not return to $\Sigma $. In order to prove these theorems, we provide a study of configurations of simple closed geodesics of closed orientable Riemannian surfaces, which may have independent interest. Our arguments are based on the curve shortening flow.

We characterise the Zoll Riemannian metrics on a given simply connected spin closed manifold as those Riemannian metrics for which two suitable min-max values in a finite dimensional loop space coincide. We also show that on odd dimensional Riemannian spheres, when certain pairs of min-max values in the loop space coincide, every point lies on a closed geodesic.

We show that, on an oriented compact surface, two sufficiently $C^{2}$-close Riemannian metrics with strictly convex boundary, no conjugate points, hyperbolic trapped set for their geodesic flows and the same marked boundary distance are isometric via a diffeomorphism that fixes the boundary. We also prove that the same conclusion holds on a compact surface for any two negatively curved Riemannian metrics with strictly convex boundary and the same marked boundary distance, extending a result of Croke and Otal.