Olympics Times – Sports Daily

THE past year will be remembered as the year of the “Lightning” Bolt that struck at the Beijing Olympic Games. Usain Bolt certainly stunned the world with his world record-breaking performances in the 100 and 200 metre sprints. Next year‘s world championship meeting in August in Berlin will be the highlight of the world athletics calendar and will surely deliver another round of explosive performances from the sprinter.

The question is: How much faster can Bolt still go? Then the question is also asked whether defending world champion Tyson Gay will be able to bounce back or will Asafa Powell be the dark horse to content with?

Bolt has been hinting at competing in the 400m and a Bolt, Jeremy Wariner and LaShawn Merrit race might just blow some life into the sport again.

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As athletes stroke the sporting gold at the Beijing Olympic Games, those big-name sporting brands hope that the effort or cash spent in preparation for the Games would also be proved lucrative. However, sometimes, things are unpredictable, just like “anything is possible”.

Being one of the of ficial sponsors, Adidas, involved with the Games since 1928, determined to secure a bigger slice of the Chinese market, where it is in strong competition with Nike.

“The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will serve as a platform for the brand to become the leading sports brand in China,” said Erica Kerner, director of Adidas’s Beijing 2008 Olympic program me. Through a combination of TV, pr int , outdoor, public relations, digital, point-of-sale and roadshows across the country, the”Im possible is Nothing” Olympic marketing campaign aims to bring sport engagement with Chinese consumers to a new level”.

Especial ly on July 5, Adidas opened its largest Brand Center worldwide, with a size of 3,170m² occupying four floors, inside the new Sanlitun Village Shopping Center in Beijing, featuring a range of unique interact ive elements that will provide consumers with a truly special retail experience.

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Sailing scored a major coup as its television coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games was recognized as ‘The Best Sports Coverage by the Host Broadcaster’ at the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) “Olympic Golden Rings” ceremony, held last night (16 December) in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The IOC’s Olympic Golden Rings ceremony recognises the contribution made by the world of television to the success of the Olympic Games. Sailing won the gold award for The Best Sports Coverage by the Host Broadcasting Organisation, the Beijing Olympic Broadcasting (BOB). IOC President Jacques Rogge was amongst the leading figures from both the sporting and broadcasting world who attended the awards ceremony held at The Olympic Museum in Lausanne on Tuesday evening.

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The Beijing Olympics were an “indisputable success” that brought change to China in areas as diverse as press freedom, the environment and public health, according to an assessment released by the International Olympic Committee that activists criticized as ignoring human rights violations that occurred during the Games.

The review, released by the Olympic committee during meetings in London this week, credited the Beijing Games with attracting broader participation and larger audiences than any other Olympics.

“The Games expanded and strengthened the Olympic movement by advancing the universality of sport,” the three-page fact sheet said. “They also brought many tangible and intangible benefits to China, especially in terms of public infrastructure improvements. While some of the positive benefits were immediately apparent, others will emerge with time.”

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The Beijing Olympics were an “indisputable success” that brought change to China in areas as diverse as press freedom, the environment and public health, according to an assessment released by the International Olympic Committee this week that activists criticized as ignoring human-rights violations that occurred during the Games.
The review, released by the Olympic committee during meetings in London this week, credited the Beijing Games with attracting broader participation and larger audiences than any other Olympics in history.

“The Games expanded and strengthened the Olympic Movement by advancing the universality of sport,” according to the three-page fact sheet. “They also brought many tangible and intangible benefits to China, especially in terms of public infrastructure improvements. While some of the positive benefits were immediately apparent, others will emerge with time.”

The document praised the Beijing organizers’ nearly flawless execution of the Games, detailing the successful coordination of half a million volunteers and maintenance of a complex transportation and security system. It noted that the media facilities were “widely praised as the best ever,” and that the Chinese government has indefinitely reduced restrictions on foreign media who report in the country.

But it made no mention of several highly publicized crackdowns on would-be protestors, or of Internet censorship at the media center and harassment of foreign journalists during the Games.

“I think the I.O.C.’s fact sheet is missing a lot of salient facts,” said Minky Worden, media director for Human Rights Watch. “What is missing in this document is the extent to which the International Olympic Committee lowered its standards on human rights around the Beijing Olympic Games.”

Thousands of people were evicted from their homes to make way for construction of Olympic venues, and some activists were detained before the Games began. Although authorities set up “protest zones” during the Olympics, no demonstrations took place, and several people who applied for protest permits were detained, including two elderly women who were initially sentenced to up to a year of “re-education through labor.” The sentence was later rescinded.

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Interest in the Beijing Summer Olympics and the start of the football season drove a 26-per-cent boost in August traffic on U.S. sports websites viewed at work, a unit of Nielsen Co. said Thursday.
The number of unique visitors accessing sports websites from their office locations grew to 42.3 million in August, up from 33.4 million last year, according to Nielsen Online.

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“With broad interest in the Olympics, and the ramp up of the college and professional football seasons, August was a busy month for online sports fans,” Jon Gibs, vice-president of media analytics at Nielsen Online, said in a statement.
“The Web offered 24/7 access to news, results and video, and fans demonstrated a healthy appetite for information about their favorite athletes and teams,” he added.
NBC Universal’s NBC Olympics website, custom built for the Beijing Games, reached 20 per cent of the active at work online population, or slightly more than 13.8 million unique visitors, Nielsen said. Those visitors stayed for a long look, spending an average of 57 minutes and seven seconds at the website.
Yahoo Sports was the No. 1 online sports destination at work with 18.7 million visitors, more than double last year’s numbers, Nielsen said.

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Michael Phelps who claimed a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympic Games said it was harder for him to learn Chinese than to win swimming races.
Before the American came to China for the 2008 Games he seriously took a few Chinese lessons. A popular online video shows how hard he tries to imitate the voice of a Chinese learning multimedia software in saying such basic words as “guo zhi” (juice), “nan hai’er” (boy) and “nu hai’er” (girl).
But still, the 23-year-old rated his Chinese language studies as the most difficult thing he had tried in his life. “Learning Mandarin is even harder than winning eight gold medals in the pool.”
In primary school Phelps took French and German courses, but the swimming ace said, “all the words, characters and pronunciations in Mandarin are so different. All of them are hard to manage.”
He was not the only star athlete trying to learn some Chinese language and culture. When gymnast Nastia Liukin arrived back home in Dallas, Texas, with five medals around her neck, the Russian-born blonde appeared in front of her reception wearing a black T-shirt with two big Chinese characters “Beijing” in the front. (blog)
“The Beijing Olympics have brought world attention to the Chinese civilization and further enhanced the utility of the Chinese language worldwide,” said Zhao Guocheng, the Office of Chinese Language Council International (OCLCI) deputy director general.

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A Chinese official has issued an unusual apology for sitting on a report of tainted milk during the Olympics, as China’s president said lessons must be learnt after 12 per cent of milk powder was found to be contaminated.

China’s worst-ever food scandal has already claimed the lives of four babies and sickened some 53,000 after they were fed the powder, made by the once-prestigious Sanlu Group. It had been laced with the industrial chemical melamine, used in plastics and glue.

The government has already said that the city authorities in Shijiazhuang, where Sanlu is based, had covered up the extent of the problem for more than a month while China was under the international spotlight during the Beijing Olympic Games.

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China’s food and drug watchdog said on Friday that 523 drug licences were revoked for illegally producing or selling stimulants during the Beijing Olympic Games.
China’s State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) began a nationwide campaign against illegal stimulants by the country’s drug makers and retailers before the Games to keep a clean Olympics.
The administration and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce had inspected all the authorized stimulant makers and revoked one producing licence for stimulants, said Shao Mingli, SFDA’s director, at a tele-conference in Beijing on Friday.
The authorities checked 13,000 stimulant wholesalers and 341,000 retailers as well as 63,000 chemical plants and withdrew 522 selling licences, the director said.
The two administrations also dug out 45 chemical plants and 334 website operators for other illegalities, he said, adding that there had been no stimulant scandal during the Olympics.
However, the two authorities have not revealed any cases in which suspects or companies were arrested or fined for the illegalities.
Shao asked local food and drug administrations to learn a lesson from the recent milk scandal throughout the country, and to strengthen supervision work on various food and drugs.
China’s domestic dairy firm Sanlu Group was exposed as having produce a toxic baby formula which has so far killed at least three babies and has sickened about 53,000 children in the country and put 11,000 in hospital.

The United States’ economic woes show the bankruptcy of Western-style democracy while China’s Olympic Games triumph shows the growing “superiority” of its Communist Party rule, China’s top newspaper said on Friday.
The commentary in the People’s Daily appeared a day after China launched its third manned space flight, which state media also celebrated as a display of the ruling Party’s power to marshal economic growth for greater national purposes.
The strikingly long essay dwelt on the Beijing Olympic Games in August as proving that China should stick to Party control and avoid the temptations of Western democracy.
“China’s unprecedented success in presenting the world with an extraordinary Olympic Games has stunned the West,” says the essay by Mei Ninghua, the chief publisher of another major Party newspaper, the Beijing Daily.
“Throughout the Olympics, the Chinese government and people demonstrated their powerful organisational strength and unsurpassed ability to mobilise society … fully embodying the superiority of China’s political system.”
Chinese officials repeatedly said the Olympics should have nothing to do with politics, and should not be used as a platform to criticise their restrictions on political life.
But there was no such modesty in this latest survey of the Olympics’ lessons, which made no mention of a milk-powder scandal that has made thousands of infants ill and killed at least four, and was covered up for months up until the end of the Games.
Late this year, the Communist Party will mark 30 years since China launched market-driven economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Some Party scholars have said the anniversary should be the starting point for liberalising political reforms.
But the republishing of the lengthy comment in Chinese by the Party’s top paper — it first appeared in the Beijing Daily — suggested China’s leaders have no appetite for big political experiments.
Instead, the Party paper argues that the contrast between China in the Games and the United States in its financial mess offers a lesson for the world on what political system works best.
“Western countries are mired in low growth, and the United States’ recent severe financial crisis is a manifestation of the dead-end of liberalism and the destruction of the myth of American institutions,” it says.
Western electoral democracy fosters corrupt, divisive and inept policy-making, it says. “Hitler came to power through an election, but that did not make the Third Reich a modern state,” it adds.
On the other hand, China’s ability to foster economic growth and channel the benefits into Olympic Games and other nation-building feats shows it is “superior to the capitalist political system … and its advantages are increasingly evident.”

source: guardian.co.uk

Seven years ago, China was awarded the Olympic Games to be held in Beijing. At that time, they thought it would cost $2 billion, but as of the opening of the games, they had spent $4 billion.
China has a population of 1.3 billion million people. There are 56 different ethnic groups and we are told 16 different dialects. What a country.
I heard that in the last 10 years or so, China has lifted more people out of poverty than any other country.
I can hear some say, “But it is a dictatorship” and this is true. They won’t allow any criticism of how they are spending money. They tore down homes to build the Olympic buildings and have put in prison some folks who disagree with them.
Still, these Olympic Games put China on the map for the world to see. So far, I think the Olympics have done more good than harm.
The fantastic opening ceremonies showed the tremendous progress China has made during the last 10 years.
The Bird Nest, the main Olympic building, had a capacity crowd of 91,000 at the opening ceremony. President Bush was one of 800 world leaders present.
Do you remember several months ago there were thousands of folks who didn’t want him to go because of China’s treatment of Tibet? He had the courage to say we must keep politics out of the Olympics.
This brought back memories of 1980 when the Winter Olympic Games were held in Lake Placid, my hometown.
Then, the International Olympic Committee was meeting in Lake Placid to decide if we should send a team to the summer Olympics to be held in Russia.
If you recall Russia was fighting in Afghanistan. To my surprise, the committee pushed by President Carter stopped U.S. athletes participating in the Russian Summer Olympics.
It was one of the few times I disagreed with our President. Keep politics out of the Olympics is a positive theme.
Do you remember how the Olympics were restarted?
After World War I, a French father and a German father became friends. They were angry that their children were killed in the war.
They thought, let us reorganize the Olympics and have our grown-up children compete on sport field and not the battlefield.
Today we see over 12,000 world athletes from over nearly 200 countries talking, competing, and making friends with each other on the sport field.
What a way to celebrate the Olympics.

source: dailyherald.com

Japan is well known for bribery in getting international events. If they can’t do it then they will try to bribe someone to get things going. For the Beijing Olympic Games in Beijing it wasn’t all that clear what was going on.
Keirin is a cycling sport popular in Japan. However, it is virually unknown outside that country. The organisers of keirin wanted to make it more popular. How to do that? By making it an Olympic sport. And how to persuade the Olympic Games to adopt the sport? Maybe a $3 million bribe helped:

Documents given to the BBC suggest that $3m (£1.5m) was paid by organizers of a Japanese cycling event to the UCI – the world cycling body. The payments were allegedly made in the 1990s. The sport, called the keirin, was supported for inclusion into the Games by the UCI, and admitted in 1996.

For the Nagano olympics:

Meanwhile, the mayor of Nagano said that the city’s Olympic bidding committee’s decision to destroy its expense books had been proper and merely “the Japanese way of doing things.” Mayor Tasuku Tsukada said he left the decision on how to destroy the expense books to other officials. He explained that the expenses were approved at the committee’s general meeting and that meant, as a matter of course, that the records could be destroyed. “In Japan, that means it’s all done and finished,” he said. Some IOC officials inspecting Nagano as a possible site for the 1998 Winter Games were entertained by geisha, an official admitted yesterday. But he denied they were prostitutes. “We couldn’t very well have had the governor pour drinks,” Sumikazu Yamaguchi, a member of the bidding committee, said. “All they did was pour drinks and dance.”

from Wikipedia:

the 1998 Games went to Nagano, Japan in a 46-to-42 vote. Many felt the reason was because the US had recently been awarded the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Others, including Welch, believed it was because Nagano had better wined and dined the officials.

In 2006, a report ordered by the Nagano region’s governor said the Japanese city provided millions of dollars in an “illegitimate and excessive level of hospitality” to IOC members, including $4.4 million spent on entertainment alone.

And read this one: (source: findarticles.com)

A new report on Nagano’s successful bid for the 1998 Winter Games, ordered by the regional government, found that an “illegitimate and excessive level of hospitality” was handed out by the Japanese city.
The Nagano Prefecture Investigation Group Report comes more than 14 years after the International Olympic Committee chose Nagano over Salt Lake City in a close vote, even though the Utah capital was widely seen as better qualified to host the Olympics.
Salt Lake City went on to be awarded the 2002 Winter Games but sparked a worldwide scandal eight years ago when Utah bidders were accused of buying IOC votes with more than $1 million in cash, gifts, trips, scholarships and even medical treatments.
There were always similar concerns about Nagano’s bid but no proof because records had been burned. Now, according to an abstract in English of the investigation group’s report, dated Nov. 22, 2005, new problems with the Nagano bid have been documented, including:
– Nearly $544,000 (all dollar figures are calculated at current conversion rates from Japanese yen) in souvenirs were given out during the bid, an average of about $5,700 per IOC member. The gift limit at the time under IOC rules was $200.
– More than $4.4 million was spent to entertain IOC members during the bid, an average of about $46,500 per IOC member.
– There was no accounting of how approximately $776,000 was used during the 1991 IOC session in Birmingham, England, where the host city for the 1998 WinterGames was selected.

One government official told the investigation group that the money was used for “lobbying and promotional activities, and simply there were no receipts. Therefore, a phrase like ‘unaccounted for’ is not right, because it sounds like somebody stole it.”

– The total price tag for promoting Nagano’s Olympic bid was more than $24 million, almost five times as much as Salt Lake City’s bid for the 1998 Winter Games reportedly cost.
– The previously revealed destruction of 90 boxes of bid records — possibly, the report stated, at the request of the then- prefectural governor — “should still be viewed as a criminal act,” because the records were supposed to have been maintained for five years.

A bid committee member told the investigation group that the records “probably included a great deal of IOC-related secrets and personal information — it might lead to trouble if the documents were kept.”

The investigation group concluded the reason was because during the bid “illegitimate and excessive levels of hospitality were offered” that had to be hidden from Nagano citizens.

– A signature was forged on a document required to take a ceremonial sword, reportedly valued at $13,000, out of Japan to be presented to then-IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch. The report suggests whoever forged the signature might be guilty of a criminal offense.

The report appears to confirm the suspicions many had after Salt Lake City became the subject of local, national and international investigations. Rumors had started shortly after Nagano’s victory about IOC members having been provided with geishas and expensive artwork and electronics.
One story frequently told was that the Nagano bid committee reportedly gave members of the IOC expensive video cameras just before the IOC vote, while Salt Lake City’s bid team handed out disposable cameras.
Among the critics was Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who blamed Salt Lake City’s loss to Nagano on “corruption,” later claiming “Japanese leadership just basically bought the Olympics. . . . We were swindled out of it.”
But soon after the Salt Lake scandal surfaced, it was revealed that Nagano had set fire to its bid records. That appeared to make it impossible to verify allegations that theJapanese city violated IOC rules.
The Nagano investigation group, however, was able to piece together information at least about how much money was spent, by combing through a pile of documents that weren’t destroyed and interviewingJapanese bid and Olympic officials. Their report does not include details of what the Nagano bid actually purchased for IOC members.
But even though the report “revealed new findings, including how much public money has been misused,” there has been little reaction to it, according to journalist Tatsuya Iwase, one of five members appointed to the group created by Nagano Gov. Yasuo Tanaka in February 2004.
Despite the lack of interest, though, Iwase said in an e-mail that the advisory group is continuing to look at the impact of the Olympics on the finances of Nagano, a relatively rural mountain region known as the “Roof of Japan.”
Anti-Olympic activists in Nagano have long questioned the amount of money invested in the 1998 Winter Games, complaining that residents have been left with little more than debt.
Tanaka’s successful campaign to lead the prefecture, an entity similar to a state, focused on the need to investigate the Olympic bid further.
Repeated attempts by the Deseret Morning News to contact Tanaka about the report were unsuccessful.
Canadian IOC member Dick Pound, who headed the Switzerland-based organization’s investigation in the Salt Lake scandal that resulted in the ouster of some members, said Friday he had not even heard about the Nagano report.
“It might be of interest,” Pound said, even though the IOC investigative commission he led has long been “out of business.” He was surprised at the size of some of the expenditures listed in the Nagano report.
“That sounds high to me,” Pound said of the amounts the Nagano report said was spent on IOC members for gifts and entertainment. “But then some of my colleagues are higher maintenance than I am.”
It was Salt Lake City’s meticulous record-keeping that helped land its bid in trouble. The scandal started with a letter from an IOC member’s daughter about the financial assistance she was receiving from bid officials.
The records even led to the two top leaders of the Salt Lake bid, Tom Welch and Dave Johnson, being prosecuted by the federal government on numerous felony charges related to the scandal, but the case was thrown out midtrial by a Utah judge in 2003.
Welch could not immediately be reached for comment about the Nagano report.

How much will they try to pay to each IOC member this time?
IOC: don’t be a fool again! Slap the japanese bribers!

read more articles about the bribes of the japanese:
- 1999: Olympic officials face bribery charges

Bribes in Japan are just normal practice to have things rolling.

Beijing has recruited 44,000 volunteers to provide services at venues of the Sept. 6-17 Paralympic Games, an organizer said Thursday.

The volunteers came from 27 countries and regions, and 90 percent of them had served at Beijing Olympic Games, said Liu Jian, director of the volunteers department of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG).

All of them had received training over the past three years, especially on how to serve the disabled, Liu said.

“We dispatched them to rehabilitation centers in the city to offer services, to learn to better communicate with the disabled and improve their service skills,” he said.

Statistics with Liu’s department show more than 1.1 million people submitted applications to volunteer for the Olympics during the recruitment period from Aug. 28, 2006, to March 31 this year. More than 900,000 of them also applied to work for the Paralympics.

Beijing recruited more than 74,000 volunteers to provide services at venues, the Olympic Village and media centers of the Aug. 8-24 Olympic Games, with the oldest aged 87. They came from 98 countries and regions.

BOCOG had also recruited 400,000 “city volunteers” to offer information services, translation and first aid at 550 temporary volunteer stations around the capital.

In addition to the Olympic volunteers directly serving the Games and the “city volunteers”, BOCOG organized 1 million “social volunteers” to offer services, such as maintaining traffic order and public order at communities and townships.

“During the Paralympics, the city volunteers and social volunteers will continue to offer services, as they have done during Olympics,” Liu said.

source: xinhuanet.com

A talented, 26-year-old Chinese dancer was seriously injured during a rehearsal for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games just 12 days before the show, and faces the prospect of being paralyzed for the rest of her life.
Liu Yan, considered one of the country’s top classical Chinese dancers, was preparing the performance of a lifetime: the only solo dance in a four-hour spectacular that was expected to be seen by a global audience of more than one billion people.
But on July 27, during an evening rehearsal at Beijing’s National Stadium, the so-called Bird’s Nest, she leaped toward a platform that malfunctioned and plunged about 10 feet into a shaft, landing on her back, according to family members.
She was rushed to a local military hospital and underwent six hours of surgery but suffers from nerve and spinal damage.
Her head was not badly injured, and she can move her arms. But she has no feeling below her chest, she said in a hospital bed interview. She cannot move her lower body, including her legs.
Doctors have told her family it is unlikely she will ever walk again.
During an interview in her hospital room on Wednesday, Liu was teary-eyed and said she was in disbelief about the accident.

Liu Yan won 2nd place in 7th Taoli competition, 1st place in 6th Chinese Dance Competition, 2nd place in 3rd CCTV dance competition.

“I never imagined I could suffer such a tragedy,” she said.
The organizers of the opening ceremony initially asked witnesses and friends not to disclose the accident ahead of the Olympic Games on Aug. 8, according to people who have visited Liu in the hospital.
But earlier this week, after inquiries from several newspapers, members of the Beijing Olympic Committee visited Liu and announced that they would soon hold a news conference.
For the most part, the Chinese state-run news media have not reported the accident, although Peoples Daily, the Communist Party’s official organ, mentioned it in a small article on Tuesday.
Zhang Yimou, the show’s artistic director and one of the country’s leading film directors, expressed deep sadness following a visit with Liu’s on Monday.
“I feel sorry for Liu Yan, my heart is full of regrets,” he said in an interview. “I’m deeply sorry. Liu Yan is a heroine. She sacrificed a lot for the Olympics, for me, for the opening ceremony.”
In an earlier interview with the Chinese media, after his artistic direction of the opening ceremony won high praise from around the world, Zhang said he was pleased with the show but added that there were some serious problems in rehearsals for a show that involved more than 15,000 performers.
“I regret many things, many details of this performance, many things I could have done better,” he said. “For example, there are performers who were injured. I blame myself for that. It might well have been avoided if I had given more detailed instructions.”
Following the accident, Liu’s parents flew to Beijing from their home in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region. Her husband and friends were seeking a specialist to help determine whether she can regain her ability to walk.
Liu, a graduate of the prestigious Beijing Dance Academy, was widely considered one of the country’s leading classical dancers. Dance experts call her movements incredibly fluid, and say her beauty radiates on the stage. Over the years, some of her performances have also been popular on YouTube.
She has won most of the nation’s top dance and drama awards, including the Lotus Cup.
She also performed last year at the country’s New Year’s Eve Gala, which is televised nationally every year and draws some of the country’s most famous singers, dancers and actors.
Liu, who recently married, is the only child of a judge and a doctor and grew up in northern China. She entered the middle school of the Beijing Dance Academy at age 11.
Her planned performance in the opening ceremony, The Silk Road, was the only solo dance in a show that was rich in traditional imagery and synchronized performances. Another dancer took her place.
Liu said it was a dream that she could be chosen for such a role. But Wednesday, she said she was hoping for a miracle, so that she might some day walk again.
“I hope one day I can just stand up like a normal person,” she said wiping away tears.

from: nytimes.com

China’s gold medal-winning women’s gymnastics team denied any of its members were underage after winning an epic battle with the United States for the Olympic team title. The Chinese continue to face questions about the age of three of its six women’s gymnasts, despite repeated assurances from Beijing Olympics officials that they turn 16 this year, as required under Olympic rules.

The New York Times reported last month that online records showed two members of China’s women’s team, He Kexin and Jiang Yuyuan, may be only 14. The age of a third athlete, Yang Yilin, then came into question when the state-run China Central Television website posted a profile indicating she too was 14.

The gymnasts were shielded from the media ahead of the Games but held a press conference after Wednesday’s win where they had to answer the allegations directly for the first time.

“My real age is 16, I don’t care about what other people say, it’s none of my business,” He said when asked about her age. “I want people to know that.” She was even asked to reveal her zodiac sign as it indicates in which year you were born under the 12-year cycle of the Chinese astrological system.

She replied monkey, meaning she was born in 1992, which would make her 16 this year and eligible for the Olympics. Journalists also asked her how she celebrated her 15th birthday, to which she replied she was at a training camp with her fellow gymnasts. Due to concerns about the well being of young gymnasts whose bodies are under huge stress when they reach the elite level, officials introduced a rule in 1997 saying they had to turn 16 during an Olympic year to compete at the Games.

According to their official biographies, the youngest gymnast on the Chinese team is Yang, who turns 16 on August 26.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacques Rogge initially laid responsibility for enforcing the age limit on China’s national gymnastics federation.

However, as the controversy continued, the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) issued a statement last Saturday saying the IOC had examined all Olympic gymnasts’ passports and determined none were underage.

“The FIG has received confirmation from the International Olympic Committee that all passports are valid for all gymnasts competing in the Beijing Olympic Games,” FIG said in a statement.

China runs huge state-funded athletics academies and has long faced criticism for the harsh regime it uses to prepare young gymnasts.

In a BBC report in 2005, British Olympic rowing great Matthew Pinsent described children in a Beijing gymnasium being pushed through the pain barrier and said one young boy had clearly been beaten by his coach.

from: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Few athletes dominate any event like Blanka Vlasic does the high jump. The current European Athlete of the year bagged 18 of the 19 outdoor events in 2007, and for Beijing she’ll be red hot favourite.

“I’m very much aware that somebody can come out and beat me no matter how big a favourite I am at the Olympics,” Vlasic said prior to the games.”So I will be preparing by concentrating on the worst possible scenario – needing to jump 2.10 and beat the world record in order to win the gold medal.”

Still 24, this will be her third Olympic games after she competed in 2000 as a 16-year-old and in 2004 – when she failed to win a podium position.

Vlasic is the daughter of Josko Vlasic – a decathlete who retains the Croatian high jump record. Standing at 6ft 3, the peppy and attractive 24-year-old sure has reasons to be grateful for her genes

Her opponents are very aware of the challenge that awaits them.

“I am ready to beat all my opponents, including the unbeatable Vlasic” said Italian Antonietta Di Martino, arguably her closest rival.

After successful jumps, Vlasic likes to thank the audience with a little dance and finishes it off by striking an imposing pose. With gold practically demanded, the question is – does she have what it takes to surpass her own jumps by the 3cms required to set a new world record?

source:yellmalta.com

Some interesting change on this Beijing Olympic games 2008 in Beijing?
Four years ago at the Athens Olympics 2004 the United States of America won most medals. This year it seems China will win the rankings.
You Think the US will still win more gold medals as China?

Well, it’s officially! Giorgio Moroder and Kong Xiangdong’s Olympic song (words by Michael Kunze) was chosen  for  the ending ceremony of  the Beijing Olympic Games.  This is  the  english version.  For the chinese version check on your right.