Olympic Times - Sports Daily

GREECE’S former 400m hurdles Olympic champion Fani Halkia has been handed a two year ban for her positive dope test at the Beijing Games, the Greek athletics federation said.

The federation confirmed a decision by its judicial committee to punish the former star.

A gold medallist at Athens in 2004 Halkia was expelled from the Beijing Olympics after testing positive for the banned steroid Methyltrienolone.

Halkia, her coach and two other athletes who failed tests also face maximum sentences of five years in prison in Greece over their respective cases.

The four suspects deny any wrongdoing and Halkia claims she was the victim of sabotage.

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Olympic champion Christine Ohuruogu was named athlete of the year by the British Olympic Association on Saturday, a year after she overturned the organization’s ban for a doping violation.

The 24-year-old Londoner beat favourite Sanya Richards at August’s Beijing Games to become Britain’s first ever female Olympic gold medallist over 400 metres.

Ohuruogu was banned for 12 months after missing three out-of-competition doping tests from October 2005 to July 2006, and had to win a court battle to overturn her lifetime BOA ban.

UK Athletics had said she was guilty of a technical offence and welcomed her onto the Beijing team, but Ohuruogu’s achievements have consistently been overshadowed.

She won the world championship in Osaka, Japan, in August 2007 barely weeks after returning to competition.

source: google.com

taly’s triumphant Olympic fencers are using their fighting skills to stay in the limelight and promote their sport now that interest has waned after the Beijing Games.

The fencing team drew wide attention after it brought home two individual gold, two individual bronze and three team bronze medals.

The swashbucklers have used media appearances at home to great effect, knowing that soon the focus will return to more traditionally popular sports like soccer and auto racing.

Diego Confalonieri, who won bronze in the team épée, wants to avoid the fate of most smaller Olympic sports that must wait until the 2012 Games in London for another 15 minutes of fame.

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The first venue for the 2012 London Olympic Games is complete and ready for competition more than three years out from the event.
The Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy (WPNSA) is the venue for the sailing events at the Games, and it has had extensive renovations including a new slipway to cater for the competition.

The project cost was approximately $23m –which was under the budget, and it was also finished ahead of the planned schedule.

As well as hosting the ten events at the Olympics, Weymouth and Portland will also be the venue for Paralympic sailing — playing host to about 400 athletes.

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London’s 2012 Olympics organizers may cancel plans to build a temporary sports venue in Greenwich in an effort to reduce costs.

The organizers, after meeting yesterday to review a report on venues by consultants KPMG, also reiterated plans to build temporary facilities for basketball in the Olympic Park and for equestrian events in Greenwich Park, in the U.K. capital’s southeast, according to an e-mailed statement from the 2012 Olympics board.

Games officials pledged to control costs after the games’ 9.3 billion-pound ($13.8 billion) budget tripled from the 2005 bid estimate. Britain’s economy contracted in the third quarter, and organizers have so far failed to arrange bank financing for the construction of the Olympic Village, a development of 3,000 apartments where athletes will live during the games.

The KPMG report recommended canceling the North Greenwich Arena 2, a 6,000-seat building that would host badminton and rhythmic gymnastics, Paul Deighton, chief executive of the games’ organizing committee, said yesterday in a presentation to the city’s legislative assembly.

“We continue to look at ways to deliver the games and to save significant amounts of money,” Deighton told the assembly. The two sports could be moved to an existing facility, though he didn’t say where.

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Few people know about Lindsey Van, just as few had heard of Stacy Dragila before she became famous at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

The U.S. Olympic Committee named Van athlete of the month for October. The ski jumper had just won her 13th national championship on Oct. 11. She holds the record for longest jump among men or women.

Unfortunately for Van and for the USA, ski jumping is the only sport in which women will not be competing at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Van says it is her last shot at the Olympics and that her sport would draw a following as passionate as women’s pole vault did when Dragila was first permitted to compete in on the Olympic stage eight years ago.

Nearly everyone involved, except members of the International Olympic Committee, would like to see Van stand at the gate at the top of the hill, slide down the runway and get her shot at a gold medal in 2010. The IOC executive board said no in 2006, citing “their development is still in the early stage thus lacking the international spread of participation and technical standard required for an event to be included.”

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Houston has been selected to host the 2012 AAU Junior Olympic Games, the country’s largest amateur sports event.

The Junior Olympics is the annual showcase event held each summer for the Amateur Athletic Union, and includes more than 15,000 participants in 20 sports, with its major focus on track and field competition.

With an estimated 30,000 spectators expected, the economic impact of the event is projected at $40 million.

This is the first time Houston has been selected to host the multisport event.

“This further validates Houston as a top-tier city for major sporting events,” said Greg Ortale, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau.

source: bizjournals.com

A Japanese schoolgirl is making headlines across the world today as the first woman to play pro baseball in Japan.

A 16-year-old schoolgirl with a mean knuckleball has been selected as the first woman ever to play alongside the men in Japanese professional baseball.

Eri Yoshida was drafted for a new independent league that will launch in April, drawing attention for a side-armed knuckler that her future manager Yoshihiro Nakata said was a marvel.

“I never dreamed of getting drafted,” Yoshida told reporters Monday, a day after she was selected to play for the Kobe 9 Cruise.

“I have only just been picked by the team and have not achieved anything,” she said. “I want to play as a pro eventually in a higher league.“

Yoshida, 155 centimetres (five feet) tall and weighing 52 kilograms (114 pounds), says she wants to follow in the footsteps of the great Boston Red Sox knuckleballer Tim Wakefield.

A female professional baseball federation existed for a few years in the 1950s, but Yoshida will become Japan’s first-ever woman to play alongside professional male players.

(c) AFP

The two, who were speaking on behalf of the International Golf Federation, were embarking on what will be a year-long process in which golf will vie with six other sports – rugby 7s, squash, karate, roller sports, softball and baseball – for inclusion in the 2016 Games.

Dawson and Votaw came away from their presentation feeling upbeat. The Commission appeared impressed that golf’s amateur and professional bodies were speaking with one voice – and they seemed similarly taken with the news that the game boasts 60 million participants worldwide.

News on Japan - blog on japan

Again, a bit of name-dropping on Dawson’s and Votaw’s part did not go amiss. The Commission liked the sound of golf’s Olympic drive having the full support of such as Tiger Woods and Lorena Ochoa.

Golf’s charitable input would have been viewed as another plus. The R&A, for instance, dig deeply into their Open championship profits to send balls, clubs and other equipment to developing golfing lands. Votaw, on behalf of the PGA Tour, referred this morning to the many millions raised for charities via the American circuit. In 2007 it amounted to 123 million dollars, with that figure upped for ‘08.

In answer to whether the members of the IOC Programme Commission as a body had looked as if they leant more towards, say, golf or roller-sports, Dawson said a wry, “Golf, I hope.”

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More than 800 firms have won £3.5bn of work in preparation for the London 2012 Olympics, it has been revealed.

The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) said the majority are small and medium-sized businesses and 98% are UK-based.
The firms are building the venues and infrastructure for the Games, to take place in Stratford, east London.
Olympics minister Tessa Jowell said: “These figures are yet more proof that London 2012 is a golden opportunity at a time of economic need.”
The Olympic site will include an 80,000-seat stadium, a 17,500-seat aquatics centre and 3,000-home Olympic Village.
‘Increase competitiveness’
The ODA said 54% of the 801 firms working on contracts awarded so far were based in London.
It added that 12% of the work was being carried out by firms based in the Olympics host boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Greenwich, Hackney, Newham and Waltham Forest.

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Even with big, mythological adjectives like “titanic”, “gargantuan”, or “colossal” placed in front of it, the phrase “fiscal stimulus package” does not begin to explain what happened in Beijing on Sunday night.

“Olympic” comes closest. This was truly the Beijing Games of fiscal stimulus packages: impressive, suppressive and excessive.

Common-or-garden stimulus packages are what governments in places like Britain, South Korea and Japan do to stimulate their economies. China’s $586 billion splurge is something entirely different. If Washington directed an equivalent percentage of its GDP at a stimulus package, it would be worth more than $2.2 trillion, and would consequently be utterly terrifying.

And, on closer inspection, China’s could indeed be something scarier than just a big stimulus package. Neatly disguised as the Kool-Aid that everyone else is drinking at the moment, Beijing’s offering is actually a knockout cocktail of political manifesto, Great Game diplomacy and domestic Riot Act.
There are three vital questions which that volume of money raises – beyond the technically critical issue of precisely where, and in what order, the money will be spent. The details were tantalisingly vague, and given the suspicion that Beijing may be double-counting investment plans already announced, economists are already at odds over how close the package’s actual financial impact will be, compared with its dramatic face value.

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The IOC are growing increasingly frustrated at Britain’s refusal to introduce legislation to outlaw the possession, supply and distribution of performance-enhancing drugs.

Their stance leaves them out of step with other European countries such as Sweden, France, Italy, Greece and Germany where anti-doping laws mean athletes and their suppliers can go to jail.

Arne Ljungqvist, the chairman of the IOC’s medical commission, said he would be pressing for a change in the British law, which would be an important legacy of the 2012 Olympics.

The subject will be raised by the IOC when Olympic host and bidding cities gather in London later this month for a post-Beijing debrief.

The IOC are considering making it a condition of bidding for future Olympic Games that candidate countries have anti-doping laws. In the meantime, just as the Chinese authorities were persuaded to introduce new legislation in the run-up to this summer’s Games, Britain will be under pressure to fall into line.

Ljungqvist, who is also a board member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said: “I think legislation is very important that criminalises certain offences as detailed in the WADA code because it allows public authorities to intervene where we cannot.

“We as sports authorities have our limited possibilities regulated by our code. We can do testing but we cannot do searches.”

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In a highly unusual show of discord between Olympic leaders, IAAF chief Lamine Diack sharply criticized IOC president Jacques Rogge on Friday for displaying “a lack of respect” for track and field.

Diack, president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, issued a strongly worded statement vowing to fight for the “rightful place of athletics at the summer Olympic Games.”

He assailed the International Olympic Committee president for criticizing Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt’s celebrations in Beijing and for suggesting the Olympic track in London could be ripped up after the 2012 Games.

“Destroying the track would be totally unacceptable,” Diack said.

Diack is scheduled to meet with Rogge in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Nov. 17.

Diack took issue with Rogge for accusing Bolt of excessive showboating and showing a lack of respect to other sprinters after his world-record performances in the 100 and 200 meters.

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CHICAGO may be riding a wave of Obama-mania, but can the American city receive a “yes you can” from the International Olympic Committee to host the 2016 summer Olympic Games?
Bookmakers certainly believe so.
The lengthy process of awarding hosting rights to the Games is well and truly under way as the competing field has been narrowed to a shortlist of four: Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Madrid.
A final decision is to be made on October 9 next year.
Japan’s capital has hosted the Games already — in 1964 — while a Chicago Games would take the Olympics back to the US for the first time since Atlanta in 1996. Chicago has previously bid for the Olympics three times (including losing out to Melbourne for the 1956 Games).
Rio, if successful, would be the first South American city to host the Games.
Previous Brazilian bids have failed due to concerns about lack of modern facilities and security fears. But the country will hope to springboard from the legacy left by hosting the soccer World Cup in 2014.
Madrid lost out to London for the 2012 Games but is bidding again, pushing its sporting culture and stadiums, status as one of the few major European capitals to have never hosted the Games and support from former IOC head Juan Antonio Samaranch.

source: theage.com.au

As sports fans across the nation ponder the implications of having a dedicated pick-up basketball player and known sports fanatic as our Commander-in-Chief, it’s worth noting today that Obama’s geographical and not athletic affiliation may prove to have the greatest impact on the future of sports in America.

Obama already has been active in Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, and given his newfound stature in the world right now, it’s not hard to imagine that his full-fledged support as President would bring the Summer Games to the Windy City for the first time in history.

Japanese officials behind Tokyo’s bid to host the 2016 Games are all but conceding today, admitting that one of Obama’s trademark speeches as part of a Chicago presentation to the IOC would be tough to beat.

The other two cities that are finalists for the 2016 Olympics are Rio de Janeiro and Madrid. When the four finalists were announced this summer, a widening rift between the IOC and the U.S. Olympic Committee over television revenues was reported to be a serious threat to Chicago’s chances, with the American city viewed as the longshot of the four finalists to secure the eventual bid.

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