Barcelona legend Johan Cruyff called yesterday for Real Madrid to apologize after they were implicated in doping accusations against his former club.
A Spanish radio station, COPE, quoted an unidentified Real Madrid “representative” as saying the club had asked the Spanish soccer federation to take drug testing more seriously.
According to the radio station’s March 13 report, Real Madrid could not understand how doctors with “questionable reputations” could work for Barcelona. It also cast doubt on doctors working for Valencia. Barcelona and Valencia have angrily denied the allegations and threatened legal action against the radio station, which has apologized, but not retracted the report.
“The accusation is too serious, too brutal, for there not to have been apologies, and well-presented too,” Cruyff said in his weekly column for the Catalan daily El Periodico de Catalunya.
Apologies should have been given “by Real Madrid themselves,” Cruyff said, not for being the accusing party, but because they were implicated in the row.
Real president Florentino Perez reportedly personally telephoned his counterpart at Barcelona, Sandro Rosell, to deny he was the source of the radio station’s story. Rivalry and sportsmanship were not mutually exclusive, Cruyff said, praising rival clubs including Real for showing support for Barca’s Eric Abidal, who had surgery to remove a liver tumor on Thursday.
“It is hard for a sports player to show a gratuitous lack of due public respect to any rival. For those who are off the field, that is to say, those who are not and have not been sports players, it comes too easily,” he said.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier