International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge supported the decision to omit David Beckham from the British soccer squad at the London Olympics in comments to CNN on Wednesday.
Rogge said that it was British coach Stuart Pearce’s job to select the best players to give the host squad their best chance for success when the London Olympic tournament opens later this month.
“If the head coach decides not to field the player, that’s the end of it,” Rogge said. “This is not an issue for sentiment. It’s not an issue for nostalgia. It’s about being the best athlete in the world in your own place, in your own sport.”
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Rogge, 70, said he would have “loved” to have seen former England soccer captain Beckham, a major player in the bidding to bring the Games to London, on the field in the Olympics.
“He has done a great job in bidding for the Games,” Rogge said. “He has a great personality. He has a very likeable person, but it’s the law of sport.”
Rogge said he planned to watch competition in all 26 sports on offer at the London Games, looking forward to seeing a swimming showdown between US stars Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte and the men’s 100m athletics final on Aug. 5.
“I want to see the fight between Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake in the sprint,” Rogge said.
Blake defeated Bolt, the reigning 100m and 200m Olympic champion and world record holder, in both events at last weekend’s Jamaican Olympic trials.
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