Londoners waking tomorrow with blurred vision and throbbing heads will not have to wait long for their next party, as the city enters its Olympic year and prepares to host the sporting show of a lifetime.
Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee, marking 60 years of her reign, will be celebrated in June followed by England’s appearance at the European soccer championships before the Olympics open on July 27.
Sebastian Coe, the double Olympic 1,500m gold medalist who is now head of London 2012 organizers LOCOG, this week likened the sequence of events to the appearance of Halley’s comet which flashes across the night sky roughly every 75 years.
London will be the only city to have hosted the summer Olympics three times, after 1908 and 1948, and the latest will easily be the biggest sporting event Britain has ever staged.
With a budget of £9.3 billion (US$14.31 billion), fears of transport chaos and more British troops assigned to protect the Games than are currently serving in Afghanistan, there are plenty of potential clouds to darken the horizon.
Coe, who said he would wake up on New Year’s Day with the same excitement he had as an Olympic athlete, prefers to see the Games as a chance to show Britain at its best, while also raising spirits both at home and abroad at a time of financial hardship.
“Waking up just 200 days away from the biggest thing this nation will have delivered in living memory is a massive responsibility,” he told the Guardian newspaper.
“And at a time when the world is a pretty difficult place for a lot of people, I think we also know we have a responsibility to try and help lift people’s spirits,” he said.
With just over 200 days to go, Britain is confident its athletes are on track to hit the stated target of winning more medals from more sports in more than a century.
Britain finished fourth in the medals table in Beijing in 2008 with 47 from 11 sports, including 19 golds.
“We have recently reviewed the data for 2011 across all World Championship and other relevant world events and rankings in every Olympic discipline for 2011,” British Olympic Association chief executive Andy Hunt said on Thursday. “This shows Team GB finishing in sixth position with 59 medals across 13 different sports in what would be a relative Olympic medals table.”
However, Hunt was mindful that some major nations do not always send top athletes to championships in the year before a Games and that London promises to be the most competitive Olympics yet.
The building of venues and infrastructure is 90 percent finished with the formal hand-over of the Olympic Park in east London to LOCOG expected early next year.
“In 2012, we will complete our task — finishing the Olympic Village, water polo arena, shooting venue at Woolwich and parklands — as we work alongside the organizing committee to prepare for next summer,” said John Armitt, chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority.
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
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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