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https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/not-a-level-playing-field-skaters-react-to-russias-kamila-valieva/articleshow/89598824.cms~'Not a level playing field': Skaters react to Russia's Kamila Valieva~Feb 15, 2022, 21:53 IST~"BEIJING: Figure skaters up against Russia's Kamila , who came top in the short programme on Tuesday despite testing positive for a banned substance, said they are determined not to let the scandal ruin their own . Fifteen-year-old Valieva was favourite for gold going into the Beijing Games, but a week into them it emerged she had tested positive in December for trimetazidine, which boosts endurance. The (CAS) on Monday ruled that she could carry on competing in the Chinese capital, although that does not mean that the Russian has been cleared of doping and could still face punishment at a later date. Asked about the CAS ruling after Tuesday's competition, the United States' Alysa Liu said: ""The court made that decision, I can't change it. ""I don't know every detail of the case but from the big picture, obviously a doping athlete competing against clean athletes is not fair,"" the 16-year-old added. Liu's father had described the skating system as ""obviously rigged"" to US media on Monday, and said he would not have encouraged Liu to become a skater had he realised this earlier. Japan's Kaori Sakamoto, who came third in the short programme behind Valieva and her Russian teammate Anna Shcherbakova -- who declined to comment on the doping issue -- said she was concentrating on herself. ""Do I feel sorry for her? I don't think so, I wouldn't say so..."" said a visibly uncomfortable Sakamoto when asked if she felt sympathy for Valieva. ""How do I say this... I'm focusing on the sport, on the competition, and at the moment I'm actually trying not to think of things like that."" Mariah Bell of the United States said the affair was ""obviously a very touchy subject"". ""I can only speak for myself and I advocate for clean sport,"" she said. Britain's Natasha McKay was more blunt. ""Obviously it is not a level playing field and at every sport it should be a level playing field, and we don't get that opportunity here,"" she said. ""But that is a decision they've made and obviously we have to stick with that."" After her performance a tearful Valieva did not stop to talk to reporters and took no part in the press conference. A spokesman for the Russian Olympic Committee said she was not feeling well. ""We decided to send her to the Olympic Village as quickly as possible,"" Konstantin Vybornov said. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said that if Valieva places in the top three at the end of the singles competition on Thursday, there will be no medal ceremony. The teenager led the Russians to first place in last week's team event but those medals will not be awarded at the Games either until the doping case is settled. Karen Chen, who won silver with Team USA, said that decision was ""definitely disappointing"". ""I really was looking forward to being on the podium with my teammates, and just sharing that moment,"" she said. ""But what can we do?"" she added. ""It's out of our control."" Canada, who came fourth, could stand to benefit if the Russians have the title taken away, but team member Madeline Schizas said it wasn't her place to comment, saying her job was to ""focus on herself"". ""I can't let anything outside my control derail me,"" she said. Alexia Paganini, competing for Switzerland, said that she had sympathy for Valieva. ""I definitely feel sorry for her,"" she said. ""She is pretty much a product of the adults around her."" But she added: ""Rules are rules and they should be followed."""
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/winter-olympics-francesco-friedrich-supreme-in-unprecedented-german-podium-sweep/articleshow/89597692.cms~Winter Olympics: Francesco Friedrich supreme in unprecedented German podium sweep~Feb 15, 2022, 20:46 IST~"YANQING (China): Any pretenders' hopes that the undisputed king of bobsleigh might relinquish his crown were brought crashing down to earth on Tuesday as Germany's and rocketed to another Olympic gold medal. Friedrich, the police officer from Dresden, led three German teams in a sweep of the podium, a feat unprecedented in any Olympic bobsleigh event going back 98 years. Friedrich was unsatisfied with his performance in the first heat - he and Margis led but a few bumps along the "" "" track meant compatriots Johannes Lochner and Florian Bauer were still capable of an upset. In the race's finale, however, the master left no doubts about his superiority, hitting speeds close to 136 kilometres an hour as they rocketed through the -12 degrees Celsius air of the Yanqing hills. Their time over four runs was 3:56.89, 0.49 seconds faster than Lochner and Bauer, and 1.69 seconds quicker than compatriots Christoph Hafer and Matthias Sommer who took bronze. It was an awesome show of German dominance even at an Olympics where the country has won seven out of eight available sliding golds and half the 24 sliding medals. The man regarded as bobsleigh greatest of all time added to his gold medals in the two-man and four-man events in Pyeongchang four years ago, with a chance at another four-man medal on Sunday. A wave of shock rippled through the crowd as Britain's Brad Hall and Nick Gleeson flipped at high speed at the perilous curve 13, the bobsleigh skidding through the finish line with the two men's helmets uncomfortably close to the ice. But they stood up and returned for a strong final run to finish in 11th place."
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/1988-winter-games-olympian-shailaja-recounts-her-fight-against-the-ice-and-odds/articleshow/89539067.cms~1988 Winter Games Olympian Shailaja recounts her fight against the ice and odds~Feb 13, 2022, 10:20 IST~"India is tropical — where does it snow?”, “How do you speak English?”, “You folks must be all vegetarian?”, ""Do girls also ski in India?” The ice-breakers were as real as the snow was artificial 34 Februarys ago when the iron-on letters on her ski jacket spelt ‘India’. Days before she zig-zagged through 63 pairs of poles to the finish line, alpine skier —a 21-year-old geology student from Delhi — wound her way through dinner conversations with athletes from 57 countries in Canada’s Calgary, a rugged city which, like her, was making its debut in 1988. Until then, her window to this oil-rich, cosmopolitan Alberta town had been a magazine double-spread photo pasted next to a picture of ‘Herminator’ aka Austrian alpine skier Hermann Maier in the bedroom of her adolescence. “I just had the sense that I was going there,” says Shailaja, India’s first woman Winter Olympian. “It wasn't a wish. It was a certainty.” Arif Khan — India’s sole candidate at the ongoing Beijing Winter — was yet to be born when Shailaja, now a 55-year-old San Diego-based mother of two, stood in front of the starting gates of the women’s slalom event at Calgary, her knees quivering at the thought of the dreaded nosedive, seven gates ahead. It didn’t help that she was the only Indian woman or that many back home would’ve liked to see her fall. “There was a lot resting on us not doing well,” says the former Olympian, speaking for fellow Indians, Gul Dev and Kishore Ratna Rai, who were competing in the men’s slalom event. “There were many detractors who believed that India wasn’t ready,” says Shailaja, hinting at Winter Games Federation officials who had wanted to visit the to assess India’s readiness. Her typewritten report of the Games, which was rejected by India publications, cites a visiting French professor of alpine skiing who, before the team’s departure, had told the press that the Indian skiers would not even manage to complete the course. Retrieving grainy YouTube clips of the 1984 Games, Shailaja recalls that she was three when her father ( the late Col. Narinder Kumar) became the principal of Gulmarg’s Indian Institute of Skiing and Mountaineering, the only institute that held skiing courses in India at the time. In J&K, the Kumars lived on a houseboat in the summers and move to Gulmarg during the winter months when, along with her brother Akshay, she would trudge up a gondola-less mountain in knee-deep powdered snow before dawn, slide down through the forest from Gulmarg to Tangmarg on wooden skis from Austria and circumvent bamboo ski gates that were not collapsible. Shailaja soon slalomed her way into the 1986 Asian Games in Japan where the three-member Indian women skiing contingent — including Hafeeza Shah and Loretta Nedo — had to remind many people in Sapporo that the highest mountains were in India. “Still, they’d be like: ‘Yeah, okay but you guys ski?’ implying ‘You are so advanced that you ski?’” says Shailaja, who had also studied Japanese in college, recalling the excessive foreign curiosity about “what we ate, what exercises we did, what yoga we did on skis.” While the Asian Games was “clean and clear”, the domestic weather around winter sports started to grow frosty when the 1988 Olympics rolled around. The seats were limited and, while it was quite apparent that she would be the top contender, the fact that Shailaja belonged to the Delhi team, she says, worked against her in the sport which had started to become cliqueish. “Several attempts were made to unseat me,” recalls the 55-year-old, who discovered days before departure that no one had arranged or paid for her air ticket. “I requested my father for a special meeting with the lieutenant governor who then immediately released funds so that Delhi could sponsor me,” says Shailaja. Then, the team would find that their coach Ashok Zerger — who had primed them with rigorous training runs at Khilanmarg for in the preceding months — had been replaced by an army officer none of the athletes had met. Later, even before their event began on February 26, Indian papers reported that the team had not qualified. When they landed in -42-degrees-centigrade - Canada, the howling winds laughed off Shailaja’s planned outfit — a raw-silk salwar kameez and blazer — as an Opening Ceremony possibility. Moments before the ceremony, a sales girl at a local sports shop would be seen tailing the Indian team members to cut out the price tag as they blew on their new ski jackets to cool the newly-emblazoned letters: “India”. Calgary kept Shailaja busy until the day of vindication. “We finished in the top half,” says Shailaja. The men secured 49th position out of 114 while Shailaja came in 28th out of 60 after finishing the trail that saw her skidding on a gate beyond which the slope seemed to fall off. At Delhi’s Palam airport, no fanfare greeted the team that ranked better than Sweden and Britain. Shailaja returned to anonymity in Delhi and felt the slight weight of scrutiny in Gulmarg that prevented the Olympian from being silly on the slopes for fear of injury."
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/winter-olympics-valievas-b-sample-yet-to-be-examined-says-ioc/articleshow/89582077.cms~Winter Olympics: Valieva's 'B' sample yet to be examined, says IOC~Updated: Feb 15, 2022, 10:26 IST~"BEIJING: The B-sample of Russian figure skater 's drug test before the Beijing is yet to be analysed despite an initial positive result, the said on Tuesday. The teenager was cleared to compete in Tuesday evening's single event after (CAS) ruling that agreed with the Russian Anti-Doping Agency's (RUSADA) decision to lift a ban on her. Valieva, 15, was tested at her national championships on Dec. 25, but the positive test for a banned angina drug was not revealed until Feb. 8, after she had already competed at the Beijing Games. CAS's decision to let Valieva compete, on the grounds that maintaining the suspension would cause her irreparable damage, has prompted outrage from athletes and officials around the world. If Valieva finishes in the top three of the women's single event, the medal ceremony will not be held during the Winter Games. The Feb. 7 medal ceremony for the women's team event, in which the USA, Japan and Canada finished after the Russian Olympic Committee, also cannot go ahead. Denis Oswald, the permanent chair of the IOC's disciplinary commission, said the ceremony delay was necessary because the drug case was not resolved. ""We want to allocate the medal to the right person,"" Oswald told a press conference. He also noted that a ""15-year-old would not do something wrong alone."" On Monday, in an interview with Reuters. World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) president Witold Banka called for a life ban on those who would dope a minor. Oswald said that given the B sample had not yet been examined by the laboratory, any ban would only be decided once there was a final decision on the case. Valieva, who is due to compete at the single competition starting about 6 p.m. Beijing time (1000 GMT), spoke to 's Channel One after practice on Monday. ""These (past few) days have been very difficult for me,"" Valieva said. ""It's as if I don't have any emotions left. I am happy but at the same time I am emotionally tired."" American Tara Lipinski, the 1998 Olympics women's champion, said Valieva should not have been allowed to take part in Tuesday's event ""regardless of age or timing of the test/results."" ""I believe this will leave a permanent scar on our sport."""
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/beijing-winter-olympics-russian-olympic-committee-team-crushes-field-to-take-relay-gold/articleshow/89543503.cms~Beijing Winter Olympics: Russian Olympic Committee team crushes field to take relay gold~Updated: Feb 13, 2022, 14:59 IST~ZHANGJIAKOU (China): The team representing the (ROC) made the most of a big lead built up in the first half of the race to storm to victory in a punishing men's 4x10 km relay at the Beijing Olympics on Sunday. The ROC team finished one minute 7.2 seconds ahead of the Norwegian team, with France picking up a superb bronze medal after a dogged display, 9.2 seconds after Norway. Whirling winds whipped up the powdery, dry snow, reducing visibility to the point where the stadium floodlights had to be turned on so that fans and television viewers could see the action. The first two racers in each team used the classic style and the second pair skied freestyle, each for three laps of 3.3 km. Just as their victorious women's team did on Saturday, the Russians made an early break as lead man accelerated in the middle of his second lap, building up a lead of more than 12 seconds to the chasing pack by the halfway point of his leg. By the time he handed over to , who won gold in last week's skiathlon and silver in the 15-km classic, the race was all but over and Bolshunov continued to set a searing pace. Norway's Paal Golberg broke away from the German and Italian racers on a one-man mission to rein in the Russian, but by the third leg the Norwegians were dragged back into a five-team knot of chasers alongside Sweden, Finland, France and Germany. The Finnish and German challenges melted away before the fourth leg, leaving Norway, Sweden and a stubborn French team to fight it out for the remaining two medals. The Swedes were next to drop behind, leaving 2022 Olympic sprint champion Johannes Klaebo in a fierce battle for silver with Frenchman Maurice Manificat as the two skied most of the final leg neck and neck. Far in front of them, Sergey Ustiugov was gliding across the line waving the flag of the ROC as Klaebo made his break for silver, the exhausted Manificat unable to respond. For the Russians it was a case of going one better than they had in 2018 when they took silver behind Klaebo and Norway with three of the same team. This time it was new man Ustiugov who was given the honour of securing the gold.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/beijing-2022-corinne-suter-confirms-swiss-dominance-with-olympic-downhill-gold/articleshow/89584429.cms~Beijing 2022: Corinne Suter confirms Swiss dominance with Olympic downhill gold~Updated: Feb 15, 2022, 11:31 IST~"YANQING: confirmed Switzerland's dominance at the Beijing on Tuesday when she streaked to victory in the women's for the country's fourth gold in the mountains. The 27-year-old world champion clocked 1min 31.87sec down the ""Rock"" course in Yanqing, finishing 0.16sec ahead of defending champion of Italy, whose silver capped a remarkable return to form after she injured her knee in a crash last month. A second Italian, , claimed bronze, 0.57sec adrift of Suter. Suter's win followed gold-medal showings by teammate Lara Gut-Behrami in the women's super-G, and Marco Odermatt and Beat Feuz in the men's giant slalom and downhill respectively. Gut-Behrami, who has also won giant slalom bronze in these Games, had complained of fatigue coming into the downhill and it showed as she limped through the line 2.16sec off the pace. ""That's sport,"" said Gut-Behrami, adding that she was ""happy"" with her Olympics. ""It doesn't take much to be slow. I was a little bit too hard on my skis. ""I tried to improve my speed, but it didn't happen."" Turning to Suter, Gut-Behrami said: ""She's always been consistent and has worked so hard. ""Since the world championships in Are in 2019 she has found the right way: great speed and aggressivity, and great feelings. And she is getting medals at big events."" After skiing out of her favoured events of the slalom and giant slalom, American Mikaela Shiffrin enjoyed a rare outing in the ultimate speed event, with one eye on Thursday's alpine combined, which incorporates a downhill followed by a slalom. Shiffrin attacked, as she had done in training, but ultimately finished well off the pace as the out-and-out downhillers showcased their expertise. Czech cross-code star Ester Ledecka had failed in her bid to claim a back-to-back Olympic super-G title just days after she retained her snowboard parallel giant slalom title, eventually finishing fifth. And her downhill was quickly over as she skied wide on one turn, a mistake that cost her two seconds. ""That's skiing, one little mistake and it's like this,"" said Ledecka. ""It doesn't feel very nice, but that's sport, that's part of the game, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose."" Germany's Kira Weidle had impressed in the two training runs, but the world silver medallist was disappointed after finishing 0.14sec off the podium in fourth."
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/winter-olympics-gasser-wins-big-air-gold-sadowski-synnott-takes-silver/articleshow/89581206.cms~Winter Olympics: Gasser wins Big Air gold, Sadowski-Synnott takes silver~Feb 15, 2022, 08:36 IST~BEIJING: Austrian snowboarder won gold at the Beijing on Tuesday. New Zealand's Zoi Sadowski-Synnott won silver while of Japan took bronze. The 30-year-old Gasser, who took gold in the inaugural Big Air competition in 2018 at Pyeongchang, launched a perfect cab double cork 1260 in her last run, which gave her 95.50, the single best score in the competition. She scored a combined 185.50 from her two best runs. Sadowski-Synnott had a combined total of 177.00 while Murase, in her first Olympics, had 171.50.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/winter-olympics-eileen-gu-takes-second-medal-of-beijing-games-but-settles-for-silver/articleshow/89581863.cms~Winter Olympics: Eileen Gu takes second medal of Beijing Games but settles for silver~Updated: Feb 15, 2022, 09:31 IST~ZHANGJIAKOU: Californian-born Chinese sensation won her second medal of the Beijing on Tuesday but had to settle for silver in a competition won by Switzerland's . The 18-year-old Gu, the face of the Games after winning gold for China in Big Air last week, was third after her first run and took a hefty backwards tumble on her second, leaving her in eighth place heading into her third and final run. She nailed her last attempt to jump into second, but faced a nervous wait with Norway's and Estonian competition favourite still to go. Neither could match Gu's score of 86.23, giving her the silver medal. Gu will have another shot at a medal in freeski halfpipe, with the qualification round taking place on Thursday and the final on Friday. Gremaud won gold with a score of 86.56. Sildaru took bronze on 82.06.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/winter-olympics-su-yiming-bags-gold-medal-in-snowboarding-big-air-event/articleshow/89589350.cms~Winter Olympics: Su Yiming bags gold medal in Snowboarding Big Air event~Feb 15, 2022, 14:52 IST~"BEIJING: China's gave himself an early 18th birthday present by grabbing gold in the men's Big Air event at the Beijing on Tuesday. Su, who also won silver in the slopestyle event, delivered a stellar performance in front of the largest crowd at the Shougang venue since the Beijing Games started, with his first two runs giving him a combined 182.50. Norway's took silver with 171.75 while Canadian finished with the bronze in 170.25. Su started with a frontside 1800 tail grab and came back with a backside triple cork 1800 for his second run that earned 93.00 points and sparked huge cheers from the crowd, as fans waved Chinese flags and shouted his name. Canadian veteran Mark McMorris did not make it to the podium after failing to land his signature tricks. ""I didn't go in hopes of a medal, I go in hopes of landing a trick, I was pretty damn close in my last one. It's definitely frustrating,"" he said."