LONDON : Britain could cut funding for half its sports at the London 2012 Olympics if the government orders another budget tightening, an official warned Tuesday, two years before the starting gun is fired.
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Usain Bolt ready to turn his back on running in Britain until 2012 Olympics due to country’s punitive tax rules for overseas stars.
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The 2012 London Olympics may not escape more budget cuts as Britain’s new government seeks to slash public spending. Britain’s Sports Minister Hugh Robertson said Thursday he could not guarantee the Olympic budget would be spared when the government’s public spending review begins in the fall.
Continued here: London 2012 Olympics under threat of budget cuts
Rafael Nadal is in action on day two of the French Open after Dinara Safina thrashes Britain’s Anne Keothavong.
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Britain’s Andy Murray takes on third seed Novak Djokovic of Serbia in the final of the Sony Ericsson Open in Miami.
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Britain’s Jenson Button wins the Australian Grand Prix ahead of team-mate Rubens Barrichello to mark a stunning debut for the new Brawn GP team while McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton finishes third.
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Jenson Button won the season-opening Australian Grand Prix on Sunday, giving Brawn GP a victory in its first Formula One race.
The Englishman led from start to finish, beating teammate Rubens Barrichello and Toyota’s Jarno Trulli, with the race finishing under caution following a late crash.
Barrichello, a Brazilian, recovered after being slow off the line at the start, while Italy’s Trulli was strong after starting from pit lane.
It was the first time since 1977 that a F1 team had won in its debut, and the third time that a team had finished first and second in its first attempt. Alfa Romeo did it in the first ever grand prix in Britain in 1950, and Mercedes did it at the French GP in 1954.
It was only the second GP win for Button, who is in his 10th year of F1. He averaged 121.649 mph (195.775 kph) at the 3.3-mile (5.3-kilometer) Albert Park circuit and finished in 1:34:15.784.
The win capped a remarkable turnaround for the former Honda team which was at risk of disbanding in the offseason when the Japanese automaker pulled out of F1. Team principal Ross Brawn took over the team, which has benefited from development spending for 2009 by its former owner last year.
“This is a fairytale ending for the first race,” Button said. “Some people may say it’s a pity the race finished under the safety car but I don’t care, I won the race and that’s all I care about.”
Further boosting Brawn GP spirits was the knowledge that the past three winners of the Australian GP went on to win the championship.
Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel and BMW’s Robert Kubica collided while running second and third with only four laps to go, ending their days and bringing out the safety car.
Reigning champion Lewis Hamilton was fourth for McLaren after starting 18th, finishing ahead of Toyota’s Timo Glock, Renault’s Fernando Alonso, Nico Rosberg of Williams and Red Bull’s Sebastien Buemi, who got one point in his first grand prix.
For the second year in a row, Ferrari finished without a point in the season opener. Felipe Massa was running in third place before his steering went on lap 45, three laps after Kimi Raikkonen spun out.
There was a crash at the first corner that ended the race for McLaren’s Heikki Kovalainen, and forced BMW’s Nick Heidfeld, Red Bull’s Mark Webber and Force India’s Adrian Sutil to pit, effectively ending their chances.
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INDIAN WELLS, California (Reuters) – Britain’s Andy Murray knows what he must do to stretch his winning streak over 13-times grand slam champion Roger Federer — the Swiss, though, is still unsure how to stop his nemesis.
Britain’s Andy Murray battles to a 7-5 7-6 win over Ivan Ljubicic to reach the last four at Indian Wells.
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CHELTENHAM, England (Reuters) – Jump racing received the perfect publicity coup on Friday when Britain’s Queen Elizabeth flew into Cheltenham to cheer on her horse in the Gold Cup.
INDIAN WELLS, California (Reuters) – World number two Roger Federer could face his nemesis Andy Murray of Britain in the semi-finals of the Indian Wells ATP tournament after being seeded second in Tuesday’s draw.
Brawn GP will replace Honda Racing in the 2009 Formula One world championship after Japan’s No. 2 carmaker sold the team to its former manager Ross Brawn.
Brawn, Honda’s team principal last year after working with seven-time champion Michael Schumacher at Ferrari and Benetton, bought all the shares in the Brackley, England-based team, Honda Motor Co. said in a statement today. Honda spokeswoman Yasuko Matsuura declined to give financial terms.
“The past few months have been extremely challenging for the team, but today’s announcement is the very pleasing conclusion to the strenuous efforts that have been made to secure its future,” Brawn, a 54-year-old Briton, said in an e- mailed statement.
The sale means 10 teams will start the March 29 season- opening Australian Grand Prix at a time when Formula One costs are coming under closer scrutiny by automakers experiencing the worst global sales slump in decades. Honda quit the most-watched motor sport in December and put the team up for sale to save more than 20 billion yen ($203 million) a year.
Ross Brawn
Following Honda’s departure, teams agreed to slash costs by 30 percent by banning testing during the season and sharing data on tires and fuel — previously areas of fierce competition. Yesterday they announced further plans to halve overall budgets in 2010 compared with last year’s level.
Brawn GP will use engines supplied by Mercedes-Benz in this year’s championship. The new team retained Honda’s driving lineup of Britain’s Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello, who held off the challenge of fellow Brazilian Bruno Senna, the nephew of three-time world champion Ayrton Senna.
Tessa Jowell seems to think so. The Olympics minister has raised the spectre of “gender discrepancies” at the 2012 games in London, specifically the fact that men will compete in 164 events, compared with 124 for women. Perhaps predictably, the Daily Mail has already made a sneery reference to “the equality Olympics” and many have chosen to concentrate on the prospect of men adopting the only two all-female Olympic sports, synchronised swimming and rhythmic gymnastics (the one where you wear a leotard and throw hula-hoops in the air).
Jowell is of course thinking more of boxing, the only totally female-free Olympic sport, not to mention canoeing, cycling, rowing, shooting and wrestling, which offer fewer medal events for women for no apparent reason other than that’s the way it’s always been. After the 2008 games the cyclist Victoria Pendleton pointed out that while Chris Hoy was able to compete for three gold medals on the track, as a woman she got just the one shot. This seems both unfair and pointless. Women’s cycling is as much an elite sport as the men’s event, and its under-representation seems to be based solely in genteel – and largely historical – reservations about ladies going fast on bikes.
There is another side to this. Current estimates suggest there are no more than 60 female wrestlers in the whole of Britain. It’s hard to make much of a case here for instant elevation, particularly with professional sports such as darts and the now-demoted baseball lobbying for their own inclusion.
In any case, the makeup of the 2012 programme is a matter solely for the International Olympic Committee, an organisation that pursues its own labyrinthine agenda largely unhindered by the opinions of UK cabinet ministers. Plus, the IOC would no doubt point to the recent inclusions of the women’s pole vault (2000) and steeplechase (2008) as evidence of its own creeping progressiveness. But the issue has at least been decisively raised. And perhaps, also, it wouldn’t really be the London Olympics without a little fevered talk of political correctness gone mad.
source: guardian.co.uk
Israeli air attacks on the Gaza Strip has resumed after a three-hour truce to allow in humanitarian aid, with border tunnels apparently the main target.
Israeli planes leafleted southern Gaza by day, warning of imminent attacks, and the sounds of war could be heard from the border by nightfall.
Nearly 700 Palestinian and 11 Israeli lives are said to have been lost since the offensive began 12 days ago.
Peace efforts move to Cairo shortly, with an Israeli envoy due in the city.
But Israel is prepared to go even deeper into the Gaza Strip in the coming hours, BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen reports from the Israeli border near Rafah.
Our editor could hear the clatter of Israeli helicopters and the report of at least one explosion from inside southern Gaza late on Wednesday night.
“Because Hamas uses your houses to hide and smuggle military weapons, the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] will attack the area,” read leaflets released earlier by the thousand over the Rafah area by Israeli planes.
Unconfirmed reports speak of a tank advance with helicopter support towards Khan Younis, also in the south, shortly after midnight.
Truce options
Israeli security sources have confirmed that senior Israeli defence official Amos Gilad will travel to Cairo on Thursday to discuss ceasefire options.
A Hamas delegation is expected in Cairo at some stage for parallel “technical” talks, Egyptian diplomats said.
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas is expected in the Egyptian capital on Friday.
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.
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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.
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.
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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