Olympic Times – Sports Daily

The International Olympic Committee is to retest frozen blood samples taken from athletes during the Beijing Games in August for traces of Cera, the so-called “third-generation erythropoietin“.
It announced the move after Tour de France officials confirmed on Tuesday that the German rider Stefan Schumacher and the Italians Riccardo Ricco and Leonardo Piepoli had tested positive this year for Cera, which is a form of EPO that has a longer-lasting effect in boosting the blood’s oxygen delivery system.
“The IOC intends to retest the samples collected this summer during the Olympic Games in Beijing,” the IOC spokeswoman, Emmanuelle Moreau, said. “Substances that will be tested for across all sports include EPO Cera.
“All samples are currently being repatriated to the Wada [the World Anti-Doping Agency]-accredited laboratory in Lausanne where Olympic samples are usually stored after the Games. The details of the retesting procedure are currently being discussed with Wada.”

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London Games will be much more fun than those in Beijing, says London mayor

Boris Johnson said today that the 2012 Olympics would be “much, much more fun” than the Beijing Games as he unveiled a vision of the “party atmosphere” they could bring to London.

Giving evidence to a committee of MPs, the London mayor suggested that visitors could be issued with BlackBerry-style gadgets to help them follow events.

And he also insisted that the cost of the Games would not rise above the £9.3bn ceiling set on the budget, even with economic conditions worsening.

Sponsor: News from Japan – Giappone News

At its first hearing since the Beijing Olympics, Johnson told the Commons culture committee that the event in China was “fantastic” but that he wanted the London Games to excel in a different way.

The 2012 Olympics would be “more friendly, more intimate”, he said. The venues would be “cosier”.

“We can produce a Games that’s just as good, if not better, without spending all that money,” said Johnson, referring to the £20bn cost of the Chinese Olympics.

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China knew about the contamination of milk products months ago but covered the scandal up to prevent it tarnishing the Beijing Olympics, according to journalists, rights groups and media critics.

The crisis broke in mid-September, a month after the Olympics, but several Chinese reporters had long known about babies being hospitalised after drinking tainted milk, yet were muzzled by the authorities, the critics say.

An editor at a respected southern China newspaper said that as early as July one of his reporters was investigating how milk powder might have been to blame for children developing kidney stones and falling seriously sick.

“As a news editor, I was deeply concerned because I sensed that this was going to be a huge public health disaster,” Southern Weekend news editor Fu Jianfeng said on his blog.

“But I could not send any reporters out to investigate. Therefore, I harboured a deep sense of guilt and defeat at the time.”

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The International Federation of Gymnastics (FIG) have concluded their five week investigation into the scrutinised ages of the Chinese gold medal-winning gymnastics team at the Beijing Games, however doubts continue to shroud their participation at Sydney in 2000.

Due to concerns about the wellbeing of young gymnasts, whose bodies are under huge stress when they reach the elite level, the FIG introduced a ruling in 1997 stating that athletes had to turn 16 during an Olympic year in order to compete at the Games.

Questions were raised throughout the Games about China’s squad of gymnasts with many critics suggesting some of the girls were as young as 14.

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Australian media are reporting today that doubts have been raised about the ages of Chinese medal-winning athletes as long ago as the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000.
Age-falsification has become a burning issue since the Beijing Games last month, where it was alleged that Chinese gymnast He Kexin, who won two gold medals, was underage and therefore should have been ineligible to compete in the event.
Rules introduced in 1997 to prevent the exploitation of under-aged gymnasts stipulate that competitors are required to be at least 16-years-old in the year the Olympics are held.
Separate investigators were able to report that they found at least nine articles published in state-run Chinese media in the past 12 months that list He’s birth date as January 1 1994, not 1992 as the Chinese authorities now claim.
The International Olympics Committee (IOC) was forced into the awkward position of having to order a probe into the ages of He and four other gymnasts from the Beijing Games whose ages were under scrutiny.




That probe is currently underway.
Today’s report in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) says the Google hacker who unearthed a trove of damning evidence about alleged age fakers in China’s Olympic gymnastics team has now forced the sport’s world governing body to extend its investigations to Chinese team members from as far back as the 2000 Sydney Games.
American hacker Mike Walker – writing under the pseudonym Stryde Hax – was the first to publish details of official documents revealing He Kexin’s true age.
Now Walker claims to have unearthed a China Central Television (CCTV) documentary in which Yang Yun – a dual bronze medalist at the Sydney Olympics – refers to herself as being aged 14 at the time of the 2000 Games.
“At that time, I was only 14-years-old,” she allegedly tells the interviewer. “I thought, if I didn’t do well this time, there is still a next time. I thought, ‘there is still hope’.”

source: nzherald.co.nz

China’s gold medal gymnasts aren’t the only ones whose ages are getting a closer look.
The investigation into the eligibility of the Chinese women’s team in Beijing has been expanded to include members of the 2000 squad, which won the bronze medal in Sydney, The Associated Press has learned.
International gymnastics officials are examining whether Yang Yun and Dong Fangxiao, in particular, were old enough to compete.
“If we had a look at all the articles that came before, during and after the games, there were always rumors about the ages of China’s athletes in Sydney,” Andre Gueisbuhler, secretary general of the International Gymnastics Federation, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
“We did not have another choice,” he said. “If we want to remain credible, then we have to look into things.”
No other Chinese teams are being looked at, Gueisbuhler said.
“At this moment in time, we just have concerns about 2000 and 2008,” he said.
The investigation is ongoing, a month after the Beijing Games ended, and there is no timetable for when it will be finished.
“It’s a work in progress,” said Emmanuelle Moreau, spokeswoman for the International Olympic Committee. “Until the work has been completed, there is nothing we can say.”
Yang’s age has long been an issue for debate.
In a June 2007 interview that aired on state broadcaster China Central Television, Yang said she was 14 at the Sydney Games.
Gymnastics rules require athletes to be 16 during an Olympic year in order to compete.
“At the time I was only 14,” she said in the interview, done in Chinese. “I thought that if I failed this time, I’ll do it again next time. There’s still hope.”
That interview, which has been widely reported, contradicts her official birthdate, which is listed as Dec. 2, 1984 and made her eligible for Sydney.
Dong’s birthdate is listed as Jan. 20, 1983, making her 17 at the time of the Sydney Games. Her blog, however, includes a reference to being born in 1985.
Yang is now engaged to Olympic all-around champion Yang Wei. Dong was a national technical official at the Beijing Olympics, serving as the secretary on vault. She was not part of any judging panel.
Kui Yuanyuan, Ling Jie, Liu Xuan and Huang Mandan were the other members of China’s 2000 squad.
Age falsification has been a problem in gymnastics since the 1980s, after the minimum age was raised from 14 to 15 in an effort to protect young athletes, whose bodies are still developing, from serious injuries. Younger gymnasts are also thought to have an advantage because they are more flexible and are likely to have an easier time doing the tough skills the sport requires. They also aren’t as likely to have a fear of failure.
The minimum age was raised to its current 16 in 1997.
There were questions about the ages of China’s Beijing squad months before the games, with media reports and online records suggesting several of the gymnasts on the six-woman squad might be as young as 14.
In August, The Associated Press found registration lists previously posted on the Web site of the General Administration of Sport of China that showed He Kexin and Yang Yilin were too young to compete. A Nov. 3 story by the Chinese government’s news agency, Xinhua, suggested He was only 14.
But Chinese officials insisted — repeatedly and heatedly — that all of its gymnasts were old enough, and they had not cheated their way to their first Olympic team gold. The FIG and IOC hoped the matter had been put to rest before the games, when the IOC said it had checked all of the girls’ passports and found them to be valid.
The controversy never went away, though, and the IOC announced three days before the games ended that it had asked the FIG to investigate one more time.
China turned over birth certificates, passports, ID cards and family residence permits for He, Yang, Jiang Yuyuan, Deng Linlin and Li Shanshan.
“The international federation has required the delivery of birth certificates and all the documents like family books, entries in schools and things like that,” IOC president Jacques Rogge said on the final day of the games. “They have received the documents, and at first sight it seems to be OK.”
If evidence of cheating is found, it could affect as many as four of the six medals the Chinese women won in Beijing. In addition to the team gold, He won gold on uneven bars and Yang got bronze medals on bars and in the all-around.
“We are waiting to hear the outcome of the IOC investigation just like everyone else,” said Steve Penny, president of USA Gymnastics.

from: ap.google.com

Beijing hosted a fantastic Paralympic Games, said Chairman of the London 2012 Organizing Committee at the press conference held Monday in Beijing.
“The Beijing Paralympic Games will be remembered for wonderful elite sport, superb organization, stunning venues and spectacular opening and closing ceremonies,” said Sebastian Coe, Chairman of the London 2012 Organizing Committee.
He extended his sincere thanks to Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (BOCOG), adding that London had learned vital and essential experiences and lessons from Beijing.
“London is proud to be the next summer Paralympic host city and we look forward to welcoming the world in 2012,” he said.
He also noted that after Beijing Games, London 2012 organizers would carry on Beijing’s work in terms of level of service to athletes, examine spectator experience, further develop the presentation of Paralympic sport and athletes, and build on the extensive volunteer programme.
He especially emphasized the importance of volunteers. “The difference between a good and a great games is the volunteers. Volunteers are the face of the Games, and we will take the volunteer programme extensively seriously.”
The London organizers also confirmed that the journey to the London 2012 Games will continue to be told on a double decker bus in London’s eight minute segment at the closing ceremony of the Beijing Paralympic Games on Wednesday.
The presentation would showcase the next generation of young performers, and the power of the Games to inspire change as reflected in the transformation of the bus from Olympic to Paralympic mode, said Bill Morris, director of Culture, Ceremonies and Education at London 2012.
“If the handover show during the Olympic Games represented the journey from London to Beijing, and the show tomorrow represents a journey to take Paralympics back to London,” he said.
The London 2012 Paralympic Games will be slated for August 29 – September 9.

from: chinadaily.com.cn

Oscar Pistorius, the South African “Blade Runner,” won his second gold medal of the Beijing Paralympics with a victory in the 200-meter sprint on Saturday, but the day was marked by controversy as the Iran wheelchair basketball team pulled out of the Games ahead of a possible matchup against Israel.

The Iran team was scheduled to play the United States on Saturday in a quarterfinal-round match but withdrew before the game. The winner would go on to meet the winner of the Canada-Israel game.

A spokesman for the Iranian delegation denied that Iran pulled out because of the possibility of playing Israel. The country has had a longstanding no-contact policy with Israel, and Iranian athletes have pulled out of events rather than meet Israelis in sports events.

The spokesman said that the Iran wheelchair basketball team withdrew because the Beijing organizers had swapped the starting times of the US-Iran and Canada-Israel matches. That swap had been made without explanation.

“Each match should be done one after another,” Iran deputy chef de mission Iran Doust said. “But unfortunately, concerning our match they didn’t observe the order and that’s the reason” for the pullout.

As it happened, Canada defeated Israel. The Canadians will face the Americans on Sunday.

TRACK AND FIELD: Pistorius won his second gold at the Bird’s Nest before a crowd of more than 50,000, taking the 200 meters by nearly a full second over the silver medalist, Jim Bob Bizzell of the U.S.

“This race is definitely going down as one of my best ever races,” Pistorius said. “I’ve never run in front of a crowd this big and just the crowd, the athletes, it was an awesome race and I couldn’t have hoped for anything better.”

He has one race to go, the 400 meters on Sunday.

China won five gold medals at the stadium on Saturday. Eighteen-year-old Yang Sen won the men’s 100-meter T35 in a world record 12.29 seconds, while Wang Fang retained her crown in women’s 200-meter T36. Yu Shiranwon the men’s 200-meter T53, and Xia Dong (men’s shot put) and Jimisu Menggen (women’s discus throw) won gold medals with world-record performances.

Xinhua’s wrapup of the day’s action is at this link.

The International Paralympic Committee’s “Sixty Seconds” YouTube show for Friday/Saturday (see window below) begins its highlights package with Friday’s Canadian sweep of the women’s 200-meter medley (SM13). Chelsey Gotell of Antigonish, N.S., finished first in a world record 2 minutes 28.15 seconds, followed by Winnipeg’s Kirby Cote of Winnipeg and Valerie Grand’Maison of Montreal. That’s followed by early Saturday road racing action, including American Oz Sanchez’s gold medal in the 12.7-kilometer hand-pedaled cycle time trial with an average of 23.35 mph, and the victory by Heinz Frei of Switzerland in another HC category. There’s also football seven-a-side (S9) action, with Russia taking on Brazil:
Universalsports.com’s re-stream of its coverage of Saturday’s track and field events is available at this link. The site’s one-hour-20-minute highlight package from Saturday’s early events are at this link.

SWIMMING: At the Water Cube, Erin Popovich finally didn’t win a gold medal — she won a silver. Popovich finished second to Huang Min of China in the women’s 50-meter butterfly (S7). “She took it out fast and had a better race than me,” Popovich said. “Hats off to her. China is having a phenomenal meet.”

Popovich, who has won 4 golds at these Games and 14 in her Paralympic career, has one more race in Beijing: the 50-meter freestyle on Sunday.

Justin Zook of the U.S. won gold in the men’s 100-meter backstroke (S10) after setting a world record in the preliminary heat of the event.

Countryman Jarrett Perry also set a world record during a preliminary heat of his event, the 100-meter backstroke (S9), but the final was won by Australian Matthew Cowdrey, his third of the Beijing Games to go along with two more from Athens 2004. Perry took the bronze.

WHEELCHAIR RUGBY: The American team had its hands full with a tough Japan team, winning by 44-37. Will Groulx led the U.S. with 12 goals and four steals, while Bryan Kirkland pitched in 11 goals and four assists.

The murderballers’ final group-stage game is Sunday against Canada, the team that beat the Amerks in the semifinal at Athens four years ago.
WHEELCHAIR BASKETBALL: While the U.S. men’s advanced through forfeit, the women’s team advanced to the gold medal game by beating Australia, 60-47, in the semifinal.

With less than five minutes to go, the U.S. was clinging to a 46-45 lead after fighting back after trailing for most of the third quarter. But the Americans pulled away at the end.

Christina Ripp and Stephanie Wheeler led the U.S. with 18 and 15 points, respectively.

The Amerkas will play Germany for the gold medal on Monday.
WHEELCHAIR TENNIS: Nick Taylor and David Wagner won the quad doubles gold with a three-set victory over Boaz Kramer and Shraga Weinberg of Israel. Taylor and Wagner overpowered the Israelis in the first set, 6-0, lost the second by 4-6, but won the third, 6-2, to defend their gold from Athens four years ago.

TABLE TENNIS: The U.S. duo of Mitch Seidenfeld and Tahl Leibovitz lost, 3-2, to Ukraine’s Yuriy Shchepanskyy and Vadym Kubov in the Class 9-10 teams tournament to end American participation in the table tennis competition at the 2008 Paralympics.

Seidenfeld, who won a gold and bronze in the 1992 Games and a silver and bronze in 1996, lost his singles match while Leibovitz, of Ozone Park, won his. But the Ukranians won the doubles match to prevail over all.

source:olympics.blogs.nytimes.com

The South African double-amputee Oscar Pistorius won the 100 meters Tuesday at the Paralympic Games, though he missed his objective of beating his own world record time.

Pistorius, nicknamed “Blade Runner” because of his carbon-fiber prosthetic legs, finished in 11.17 seconds at the Bird’s Nest stadium, about a quarter of a second slower than his world mark of 10.91 set last year.

Pistorius surged past Jerome Singleton of the United States in the closing stages to take the title in the T44 class, with another American, Brian Frasure, coming in third.

Marlon Shirley also of the United States fell down during the race. Pistorius is also hoping to win gold medals in the 200 and 400 meters.

“Regardless of what the time was, I’m really happy,” Pistorius, 21, told reporters.

Pistorius was born without his fibula, the smaller of the two bones in the lower legs, and when he was 11 months old both limbs were amputated below the knee. He took up running as a teenager to recover from a rugby injury and has broken more than 20 Paralympic world marks. He holds world records in his category for the 100, 200 and 400 sprints and won the 200 at the Athens Paralympics in 2004.
The International Association of Athletics Federations, track’s ruling body, ruled that Pistorius’s J-shaped carbon fiber blades gave him an advantage and barred him from competing against able-bodied athletes. In May, he won a ruling at the Court of Arbitration for Sport that overturned the ban.

But he failed to make the Olympic qualifying standard for the 400-meter individual sprint. The South African Olympic Committee bypassed him for its 1,600-meter relay team for the Beijing Games.

Also Tuesday, Paralympics organizers annulled a track result and ordered the winner to return her medal after upholding a protest over the race, in which six wheelchair athletes fell and one was taken to the hospital.

A crash during the final lap of the women’s T54 class 5,000 meters on Monday night resulted in just five of the 11 racers finishing. Diane Roy of Canada was asked Tuesday to give her gold medal back as organizers rescheduled the race for Sept. 12.

Edith Hunkeler of Switzerland, whose fall produced a domino effect at the Bird’s Nest stadium, was disqualified from the rerun, organizers said.

Japan’s Wakako Tsuchida was taken to the hospital for X-rays but had no broken bones, said Peng Mingqiang, the medical services manager at the stadium.

The annulment was declared after Australia’s team said their racer Christie Dawes had been obstructed. A U.S. protest about another incident wasn’t heard, nor was an objection by the Swiss team about officials blocking racers in the last 50 meters as they tried to help the injured, Cohen said.

from: iht.com

China: As Paralympics Launch, Disabled Face Discrimination

Hiring Bias, Harassment of Disabled Organizations Undermine Laws

Despite recent positive steps, discrimination against persons with disabilities continues in China and organizations for the disabled face government pressure and harassment, Human Rights Watch said today on the eve of the September 6 Paralympic Games in Beijing.
“The Chinese government deserves praise for enacting laws and ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “But so far these protections have meant little to persons with disabilities and their advocates in China who struggle to promote their rights and, in particular, to fairly compete for employment.”
The Chinese government has in recent years enacted a variety of new laws including the Law on the Protection of Disabled Persons, Regulations on the Education of Persons with Disabilities, and the Regulations on Employment of Persons with Disabilities, which on paper provide impressive protections of the rights of China’s estimated 82.7 million persons with disabilities. Human Rights Watch applauded the Chinese government’s August 1, 2008, ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Human Rights Watch said that the new laws have not ended discriminatory employment practices. In June 2007, shocking images of workers who had been held in slave-like conditions in Shanxi brick kilns were published; many of the workers proved to have mental disabilities. Over the next two months, authorities endeavored to free 1,340 people from similar working conditions in kilns, mines, and other forced labor situations. In August 2007, the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced that 367 of those freed had mental disabilities, underscoring that this population remains highly vulnerable to such exploitation.
A 2007 survey by the China University of Political Science and Law of 3,454 people in 10 cities, including Beijing, Guangzhou and Nanjing, among others, revealed that 22 percent of the respondents said their physical disabilities had prompted employers in both the public and private sectors to reject them for jobs. Those attitudes may have contributed to unemployment of the disabled. Official statistics show that more than 8.58 million employable people with disabilities did not have jobs in 2007 and that this number rises by 300,000 per year. Although the government has imposed a mandatory quota requiring that people with disabilities comprise a minimum of 1.5 percent of all employees of government departments, enterprises, and institutions, there is little evidence of official efforts to enforce that quota.
Human Rights Watch called for the Chinese government to ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Optional Protocol, and to loosen restrictions on grassroots civil society organizations dedicated to assisting people with disabilities. Citizens of states which join the Optional Protocol can seek redress at the UN’s Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities after they exhaust domestic legal remedies for convention violations.
The Chinese government has only in the past two decades begun to tolerate grassroots civil society organizations, which operate outside official bureaucracy and control of the Chinese Communist Party. However, such organizations, particularly those devoted to addressing the needs of China’s HIV/AIDS and chronic hepatitis B sufferers, continue to be targets for repression by Chinese security forces suspicious of such groups.
Meng Weina, founder of China’s Huiling Community Services, a nongovernmental organization which assists disabled people in eight major Chinese cities, complained of harassment by Shanghai police in a letter to the International Olympic and Paralympic Committees. A group of Meng’s mentally disabled students were harassed en route to the Special Olympics in Shanghai on October 11, 2007; Meng described the incident as evidence that Chinese police “believe that events initiated by civil society must be ‘dangerous’ and ‘destructive.’”
“Until the Chinese government tolerates a civil society which operates without threat of official repression and improves ordinary citizens’ access to justice, its commitments on paper to people with disabilities will remain limited,” Richardson said.
Human Rights Watch said that the Beijing Paralympics also offer the Chinese government an opportunity to fulfill its Olympics-related commitments to media freedom and internet access. During the August 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the Chinese government continued to obstruct media freedom and to restrict foreign journalists’ access to the internet.
“The Paralympics are the Chinese government’s last chance to live up to the Olympics-related human rights commitments made to the international community, but which were repeatedly violated during the Beijing Games,” Richardson said.

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from: hrw.org

Asafa Powell rebounded from another disappointing Olympics by winning the 100 meters in 9.87 seconds at the British Grand Prix in Gateshead, England, on Sunday.
Powell, the former world record holder in the 100 who finished fifth at the Beijing Games, extended his lead all the way and won by 3 meters.
“It would have been different in the Olympics if I had run like this,” Powell said.
Bernard Lagat of Tucson won the 1,000 meters in a personal-best time of 2:16.18.
Lagat, who competed at the Olympics as an American for the first time, struggled in Beijing. He failed to qualify for the 1,500 final and finished ninth in the 5,000.
Tyson Gay won the 200 in 20.26, showing no signs of the hamstring problems that bothered him at the U.S. Trials and left him out of the Olympic 100 final. Wallace Spearmon, who was disqualified in Beijing for leaving his lane, was second.
Lauryn Williams of the U.S. won the women’s 100 in 11.24, beating Olympic champion Shelly-Ann Fraser of Jamaica by five-hundredths of a second.

source: azcentral.com

Australia’s Paralympic team is aiming to take its all-time medal tally over 1000 at the Beijing Games starting on Saturday.
The team of 170 athletes – 96 men and 74 women – which flew out from Sydney today is the largest team Australia has sent overseas for a Paralympic Games.
And the Australian Paralympic Committee is confident it can collect the 92 medals it needs to take Australia’s tally to 1000 over the past 48 years.
“Its a hard task, but we’re in the running for that and we could win the 1000th medal in these Games,” committee CEO Darren Peters said. “It’s pretty exciting.”
No more specific medal projections would be made so as not to place extra pressure on athletes already feeling the weight of expectation, he said.
The athletes will have a few days to acclimatise to conditions in Beijing before the 13th Paralympic Games, which run from September 6 to 17.
At the Paralympics in Athens in 2004, Australia won 100 medals and came fifth overall with 26 gold, 38 silver and 36 bronze.
China topped the medal tally with 63 gold and 141 medals overall and is expected to considerably exceed their 2004 tally at their home Paralympics.
The team’s best-known athlete Kurt Fearnley, who won gold in the wheelchair marathon in Athens, was impatient to get started.
“It’s been four years in waiting,” Fearnley told AAP.
“I’m putting myself in for individual medals and hopefully I’m on the higher end of the medals.”
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s wife Therese Rein, an honorary member of the Paralympic team, was at the airport to wish them luck.
“The team is brilliant and the atmosphere and support between athletes is amazing,” she said.
“They’ve all trained really hard and I’m sure they’re going to do brilliantly.”
Ms Rein’s father was an Australian Paralympic athlete in the 1950s.
“He was an archer, he played wheelchair basketball, he played tennis and he swam,” said Ms Rein.
“Sports was really meaningful for him and helped him to be the best he could be.”
Australian Paralympic Committee chairman Greg Hartung said the team was the best away team Australia had ever assembled.
“They are big on talent and big on toughness and we will expect our athletes to perform at peak value for Australia,” he said.

source: smh.com.au

A shot for Olympic gold can be an opportunity of a lifetime for athletes. But for companies that spent heavily on advertising and marketing at the Olympics, the Beijing Games offered a different kind of golden opportunity: the chance to advertise their goods to a worldwide audience and for more exposure to consumer-rich China.
“Until China, never before has the market potential of the host country on its own been viewed as possibly worth the significant investment,” says Julius Roberge of branding company Siegel + Gale.
Twelve companies from a variety of industries acted as worldwide Olympic sponsors for the 2008 Games, while others sponsored individual teams or athletes.
Of the represented industries, three stood out as successes — sportswear, media and food and beverage — in their bids to seize worldwide recognition for their brands to boost sales and profit potential.
Every men’s swimming event was won by an athlete donning the Speedo LZR Racer suit, with 94 percent of all gold medals going to swimmers who wore one.
Speedo International is a unit of privately held Pentland Group, based in London.
Chinese sportswear brand Li Ning also got a boost after its founder lit the flame in the opening ceremony. Shares jumped as much as 13 percent during the Olympic Games.
“Li Ning might well have been the official sponsor for the games, in our opinion,” says Stifel Nicolaus analyst Thomas Shaw.
Audiences returned to watching broadcast TV to view their favorite events, even as Internet downloads of the competition surged.
General Electric (GE), the parent company of NBC, had the exclusive broadcast rights for the 17-day games. The network averaged 27.7 million viewers a night for its prime-time coverage, which was higher than the averages for both the 2004 and 2000 Olympics.
Food and beverage companies, meanwhile, were awarded with strong advertising and marketing relationships, including a Kellogg (K) deal with gold-medalist swimmer Michael Phelps and Coca-Cola’s (KO) unity-themed marketing campaign featuring Chinese basketball star Yao Ming.

source: seattletimes.nwsource.com

Is He Kexin 16 or 14? Doctors and forensics experts say bone growth could reveal how old the Olympic medalists really are.
How do you tell the age of a Chinese gymnast?
Don’t bother with those government-issued passports or birth certificates.

Go for the X-rays.
For all the global hand-wringing over how international gymnastics officials will ever figure out whether three members of the Chinese women’s team were old enough to compete, doctors and forensics experts said it’s actually not too difficult.
The science of determining age is has been honed by decades of treating patients with growth disorders, identifying youthful homicide victims and determining the deportation status of illegal immigrants.
“It would be relatively easy,” said Dr. David Senn, a forensic odontologist at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center who has analyzed numerous X-rays of immigrants apprehended at the border.
The science is based on measuring the growth of bones and teeth as children mature. Decades of data have been distilled into detailed tables recording the precise size and shape of skeletal components broken down by age, sex and race.
The task is so straightforward that Dr. Peter Hampl, president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, said the Chinese government should just consent to X-rays and let the films speak for themselves.
“If there is nothing to be afraid of, let their kids be X-rayed,” he said. “It’s almost incriminating if they don’t.”
It may seem strange that amid the outsized pageantry of the Beijing Games, the biggest controversy has surrounded three tiny Chinese gymnasts whose combined weight is 216 pounds.
The ages of He Kexin, Yang Yilin and Jiang Yuyuan came into question weeks ago after the discovery of online registration records listing birth dates that would make all three girls 14 years old. Olympic rules require that a gymnast be at least 16 during the year the Games are held. The government attempted to put the issue to rest by producing passports that declared the girls met the age requirement.
The controversy reached Olympian proportions after the Chinese team beat the American gymnasts in the team competition. In addition to the team gold, He edged American Nastia Liukin for the top prize in uneven bars by a tiebreaker, and Yang won the bronze medal in that event and in the all-around competition.
After new complaints surfaced, the International Olympic Committee announced Friday that it was asking the International Gymnastics Federation to reexamine the Chinese gymnasts’ age.
Instead of searching through documents, the matter could be settled with X-rays, said Dr. Gil Brogdon, a professor emeritus of radiology at the University of South Alabama in Mobile and author of the textbook “Forensic Radiology.”
Bones fuse together according to a well-documented schedule. For girls between the ages of 13 and 17, the best places to look are the knee, wrist, elbow and iliac crest on the pelvis, he said. The younger they are, the more obvious the evidence.
“A Caucasian girl is going to fuse her knee centers at about age 15; they’re going to fuse their iliac crest at about age 16; and part of the elbow will start fusing around 13 or 14,” he said. “That’s the way you do it.”
For the Chinese gymnasts, investigators would have to consult growth tables for Asian girls, Brogdon said.
One complication with teenage girls is that strenuous exercise can suppress estrogen production, delaying bone development and making them appear to belong to a younger person, said Dr. Vicente Gilsanz, a professor of radiology and pediatrics at USC.
But Brogdon said that by comparing multiple bones, “you could come pretty close” to distinguishing a 14-year-old from a 16-year-old.
Teeth are also useful. U.S. immigration authorities often rely on dental X-rays to determine for deportation purposes whether an illegal immigrant is an adult or a minor.
“Of course, everybody who gets arrested says they are 17,” Senn said.
He said he can pinpoint ages within 18 months using images of a person’s wisdom teeth, which start forming around age 9 and are not fully developed until around 19. For the Chinese gymnasts, Senn said, he would also look at their second molars, which grow until age 15 or so.
Dr. Michael Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, said that with both teeth and skeletal X-rays, “you should be able to get within 12 months” of someone’s age.
All this science probably won’t mean much because Chinese authorities are not likely to agree to let independent doctors take X-rays of their gymnasts.
In that case, sports fans will be left to contemplate the girls’ physical appearance.

source: latimes.com

The Paralympic Games are known as a joyful Games, a friendly Games, as an event far more laid back than their more famous cousin, the Olympics.

But if you think this means that every competitor at the Paralympics wears a halo, you’d be wrong.
In a perverse way, the fact that some people are willing to cheat to earn a medal at the Games can be seen as a sign of quite how seriously the competition is taken.
So how do people try and break the rules at the Paralympics, and how do their methods differ from their able-bodied counterparts?
Performance-enhancing drugs are also a problem in Paralympic sport.
The main offenders are competitors in powerlifting, just as weighlifters at the Olympics often seem to get into trouble.
In Sydney 2000, there were a total of 14 athletes who returned positive drug tests. The majority of these (10 out of 14) were powerlifting, with athletes mainly using drugs to increase power and strength.
In this regard the cheaters are little different to athletes like Ben Johnson in Olympic sprinting, or cyclist Floyd Landis in the Tour de France, who use steroids or EPO to increase muscle strength, speed, power and endurance.
There is another category of Paralympic cheats, however, whose illegal behaviour would make most people turn pale.
They are the “boosters”, mainly athletes who have spinal cord injuries such as paraplegia.
To gain an unfair advantage in their chosen sports, they try to raise their blood pressure, to trigger the kind of fight or flight response that normally happens when someone is in danger.
To do this they don’t take drugs – instead, they injure themselves to trick their bodies into boosting performance.
Some of the ways that Paralympic athletes “boost” include sitting on pins, thumb tacks or ball bearings, turning off their catheters – allowing fluid to build up inside the body – while some male athletes who go so far as to tie wire around their genital area.
Such extraordinary and totally illegal manoeuvres cause no pain to the athletes – who have no feeling in those parts of the body – but they can lead to a boost to athletic performance of up to 15 per cent.
Paralympic athletes are tested to ensure that their level of disability – or put another way, their range of movement – tallies with their registration. This is designed to stop people faking or overstating their disability to gain an advantage.
The biggest scandal in Paralympics history, however, relates to the faking of a mental rather than physical disability. In the Sydney Games of 2000, the Spanish team won the basketball event for intellectually disabled competitors.
It was only afterwards, when 10 out of the 12-member squad were found not to have any intellectual disabilities that the team was disqualified, causing a furore in Paralympic sport.
A Spanish journalist, who went undercover and became part of the Spanish squad, broke the story, claiming that officials had intentionally sought out people who were not intellectually disabled to boost the team’s chances of winning.
The International Paralympic Committee reacted to the scandal by taking all intellectual disability events off the program for Athens in 2004.
There was more disappointment in store for genuinely intellectually disabled athletes, when the IPC left their events out of the Beijing Games as well.
There is some hope for the future, however, as the IPC will revisit its decision after Beijing, so there could be some intellectual disability events on the program for London in four years time.

source: abc.net.au

The national athletes competed at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games without any insurance policy in accordance with the global practice in sports, it has been revealed.
Our correspondent, who covered the games, learnt that the National Sports Commission failed to insure the athletes against accidents and other emergency situations that might arise at the games.
It was learnt that a budget of N5.5 million was presented to the NSC for endorsement before the games but the paper was not signed.
The special sports athletes traveling to Beijing for the Paralympics scheduled to take place between September 6 and 17 will also suffer the same fate, our correspondent also learnt.
“The practice all over the world is to insure every athlete and official before competitions so that they will be motivated to give the country their best at such events.
“We have to thank God that we did not have any serious case of injury at the games,” our source revealed.
The athletes that represented the country at the Algiers 2007 All Africa Games were fully insured by the Team Nigeria Trust Fund led by Suleiman Ali.
Our correspondent also learnt that some of the athletes, who represented the country at the Beijing Games were aware of the development and this might have affected their performances.
Nigeria finished with one silver and three bronze medals to place 61 out of the 89 countries that made it to the medals table in Beijing.
A total of 205 countries took part in the games.

from: punchng.com

We got our full measure of Olympic moments in the just-completed Beijing Games, topped by Michael Phelps’s eight gold medals and Usain Bolt’s lightning sprints.

Nonetheless, some of the greatest feats took place in corporate suites, where the Olympics’ global sponsors calculated huge returns on their investments.

General Electric Co.’s NBC soared past its $1 billion ad revenue target by delivering the biggest TV audience for a non- U.S. Summer Games since Barcelona in 1992. Its industrial divisions sold $700 million of equipment to Olympics venues and other Beijing customers.

Coca-Cola’s Olympic-themed “Red Around The World” campaign yielded 17 percent and 18 percent volume gains in China the past two years. Coke not only cut into Pepsi’s market share lead, it also induced Yao Ming, China’s iconic basketball player, to leave Pepsi and endorse Coke.

I could go on and on about the Olympic sponsors as hustlers — perhaps McDonald’s super-sized ad campaign, “I’m loving it when China wins” or Adidas’s new four-story retail emporium in Beijing, the shoemaker’s biggest in the world. Yes I could, except I know my astute readers don’t need Kodak to get the picture. (If you did happen to need Kodak, Beijing is awash with this Olympic sponsor’s latest digital imaging products.)

Corporate Land Rush

Let me be blunt. What has unfolded in China the past two weeks is less a global sports festival than a corporate land rush into the world’s No. 1 growth market. In those terms, the Cha-Ching Games of Beijing have been a huge success.

In terms of the vision of Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, Beijing represents a total bastardization. His credo was “The important thing is not to win but take part.” The Beijing Games’ motto was: “Do you take Visa?” (Of course they do, silly; Visa is another global sponsor which plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into the Games.)

I’m no naif. Sure it’s been many an Olympiad since there were pure amateurs. Sure the Games have been big business ever since the Los Angeles Games of 1984, when Peter Ueberroth showed how lucrative they could be.

What Beijing did was remove the last fig leaf from the Olympic ideal. Put it right up there among the laurel leaves on the winners’ heads and that was that.

The International Olympic Committee sold out the Games’ soul — even if at a handsome price — to accommodate a host that didn’t subscribe to basic Olympics values and sponsors that didn’t seem to care.

Berlin Games

Not since the worst moments of Avery Brundage, the longtime Olympics autocrat who appeased Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Games by pulling American Jewish runners from a track event, has there been such pitiful leadership.

IOC President Jacques Rogge and his cohorts repeatedly let the Chinese play them for patsies. In part, the suits from Lausanne, Switzerland — IOC headquarters — were victims of their own egos.

They awarded Beijing the Games in 2001 under a dearly held conceit: that the Olympics are a great geopolitical force for good. It’s why they prefer to call this a Movement, not a sports property. That’s why Juan Antonio Samaranch, the longtime imperious president of the IOC, liked to be called “Your Excellency.”

Beijing represented both a grand commercial opportunity for sponsors and a grandiose gesture for the Movement. The Olympics were supposed to be, at once, a welcoming of China into the international community and a means of changing China’s uglier practices. The Beijing delegation pledged human-rights reforms if awarded the Games.

Business China’s Way

Alas, this proved to be less the stuff of a Nobel Peace Prize than of a Faustian bargain. The closer the 2008 Games grew, the less sway Lausanne held over Beijing. In the seven years between bid and Games, China had become a fast-emerging economic power, which did business the way it did government: in its own didactic way.

By the time it was clear China had its own ideas about what constituted human rights, media access, peaceful dissent and other such western values, it was too late. A predictable, recurring pattern developed.

NBC and other broadcasters would scream about China’s severe restrictions on where they’d allow cameras outside athletic venues. IOC officials would “tsk, tsk.” China would do as it bloody well pleased.

Internet Access

Journalists would scream about China’s restrictions on their Internet access during the Games. IOC officials would “tsk, tsk.” China would do as it pleased.

The IOC was at its most feeble when it refused to stand up for Joey Cheek, the gold-medal speed skater at Turin. He’s become a prominent advocate for Darfur and wanted to come to Beijing to enlist other Olympians in the cause.

China, which is Sudan’s biggest oil customer and has been accused of complicity in that country’s Darfur slaughters, could see no good in that. Cheek was refused a visitor visa and the IOC declined to stand up for him.

In the same non-Olympic spirit, IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies repeatedly deflected reporters’ increasingly hostile questions about why no permits had been issued for protests that were supposed to be allowed in designated areas.

The Chinese government finally provided an answer of sorts. It threatened two elderly women who’d submitted repeated protest applications with a sentence to re-education camp if they persisted. With such hosts, the Olympics were about as much fun as the cultural revolution.

Rogge’s Status

Thus did Beijing wind up being less a coming-out party for China than a shakedown of its many visitors. Olympic sponsors may nonetheless have done very well by the Games, but the IOC has not. Rogge’s alpha status in the Olympic movement has been weakened.
And even sponsors who did great business in Beijing should worry about the way these Games played out. The Olympic rings are the world’s most recognized brand, but they have been dinged.

source: bloomberg.com

The British capital can’t match China for spending or flash. It aims instead to emphasize fun at the 2012 Summer Olympics
The over-the-top pageantry of the 2008 Beijing Olympics has left many Londoners wondering how Britain’s capital can live up to expectations when it hosts the next summer Olympiad in 2012. The city’s mayor, Boris Johnson, summed up the mood: “We’ve been dazzled, impressed, and blown away by these Beijing Games,” he says, adding, “but we’ve not been intimidated.”
Brave words, but the London mayor knows he’s got his work cut out to match what International Olympic Committee Chairman Jacques Rogge rightfully called an “extraordinary Games.” The British capital has a budget of just over $17 billion to deliver London 2012, compared with the $44 billion that Chinese authorities spent on the Beijing Games. China bulldozed neighborhoods to make way for the Games and throttled factories and driving in a scramble to clean up Beijing’s polluted air, but British officials enjoy no such impunity. Indeed, they’re already coming up against taxpayer outcry over plans for the Olympic site in East London.
All the more reason for London to pay close attention to where Beijing succeeded—and a few areas where it could have done better. For instance, although Beijing’s operations worked with clockwork precision, many events were surprisingly short on spectators (BusinessWeek.com, 8/15/08). London has already said it aims to avoid that by making more seats available to Londoners at discount prices.
Party-Loving Britain
“London definitely could take lessons from how the [Beijing] Games were run,” says James Kennell, senior lecturer in tourism and urban renewal at the University of Greenwich east of London, who figures investments made in the runup to London 2012 will add more than $3 billion to the country’s gross domestic product over the next four years.
Perhaps the most important difference, London officials say, will be the overall atmosphere and attitude of the event. Beijing 2008 was a statement from Chinese authorities about the country’s rising global stature and economic power. But many visitors felt that the tight security and prickly, protest-wary officials made Beijing the “no fun” Games. Leaders in party-loving Britain already are talking of a more laid-back approach for 2012.
“The best parties aren’t always the ones that cost the most money,” says Tim Parr, head of capital programs and major events for Deloitte’s consulting practice, who was part of a team sent by the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games to learn from Beijing. “The challenge for London is to create a party atmosphere with a great sporting experience.”

History of Project Delays
Of course, that means pulling off the planning and construction on time. Unfortunately, the British capital doesn’t have the best track record for managing multibillion-dollar projects. Most recently, the new Wembley Stadium—the country’s national soccer arena—was completed a year late and roughly $200 million over budget. The so-called Millennium Dome similarly cost $1.3 billion to build in the late 1990s, but after a brief series of events around the turn of the millennium, it sat unused for years before American billionaire Philip Anschutz bought the tent-like structure at a huge discount and turned it into a successful concert venue (BusinessWeek.com, 7/20/07).
Ahead of London 2012, experts figure Britain also must match China’s success in transport and security. An estimated $1.3 billion of London’s $17 billion budget will be spent on upgrading the city’s 100-year-old underground and rail system. A further $407 million is earmarked for Olympic policing, a 15% budget increase since the city won the right to host the Games back in 2005.
Where London really could make its mark, though, is in offering a quirkier and more intimate Games compared to Beijing’s flashy facilities and choreographed mega-spectaculars. That spirit was on show during the Beijing closing ceremonies, when beloved Led Zeppelin rocker Jimmy Page and soccer superstar David Beckham were featured in the handover from Beijing to London. In sharp contrast to China’s big-budget productions, British officials said they had wanted to put on a more understated and casual show.

More Tickets for Locals
How will that translate into the London 2012 Olympics? According to Deloitte’s Parr, the next Summer Games will be a more social event, with big TV screens and food vendors spread throughout the Olympic site. That will allow spectators to continue the party even after the sports have stopped—as well as letting those without tickets to get into the Olympic spirit. “The key is to create atmosphere at the venues,” Parr says.
London aims to eliminate Beijing’s problem with empty seats by making more tickets available to locals. Running legend Sebastian Coe, the chairman of the London Organizing Committee, has suggested that unused tickets held by sponsors—a source of many of the Beijing no-shows—could be resold to the public if they’re not allocated by a certain date.
All that should help create more of a carnival atmosphere than the Beijing Games provided. Formerly imperial Britain—now more laid-back than ambitious, upwardly mobile China—will be hosting its third Olympics and has less to prove to the world. As long as security is effective but not heavy-handed, London should manage to provide Olympians and guests a great time.
As for attitude, the famously dry British humor was on display when reporters asked Boris Johnson if he had any criticism of the 2008 Games. No, the mayor responded, and then added jokingly in reference to the controversial dubbing of a young singer in Beijing’s opening ceremonies: “Had it been us, I don’t think we would have necessarily done the switcheroo with the girl.”

source: businessweek.com