The Romanian Gymnastics Federation banned three former gymnasts from coaching and refereeing in official competitions for five years after they appeared nude in a DVD film and photographs published in Japan.
The film, which began to be marketed in Japan two weeks ago, shows Romanian gymnasts Lavinia Milosovici, 26, Claudia Presecan, 23, and Corina Ungureanu, 22, posing and performing gymnastics naked.
``Their action [posing nude] has damaged Romanian gymnastics,'' Adrian Stoica, the secretary general of the federation, said on Wednesday.
PHOTO: AP
The suspension means the athletes can coach privately, but cannot take part in any official competitions organized by the federation. Milosovici is a gymnastics coach while Presecan teaches gymnastics in a school.
Stoica said that while athletes had the right to pose nude, they should not have used gymnastics suits with emblems of the Romanian federation.
Milosovici won two gold medals at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, while Presecan took a gold at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
The decision to suspend them comes a day after the Japanese Junior Gymnastic Club Federation officials debated whether to ban Romania from a youth tournament scheduled to take place in Yokohama, Japan, next September.
Japanese organizers, who were concerned that the three former stars could set a bad example for teenage gymnasts, decided in the end to allow two Romanian gymnasts to be among the 40 athletes from 14 nations expected to take part in the competition.
The flap over the DVDs comes weeks after the three former gymnasts bared all in photos carried in the Nov. 16 edition of Shukan Gendai, a Japanese weekly magazine. The magazine bought the photos from Tokyo-based Ongaku Senaka Co, which published a book of the photos last month.
Both the publisher and the DVD producers refused to say how much the former athletes earned, but Romanian newspapers reported the former gymnastics stars earned some US$40,000 each for the pictures and the film.
Ungureanu, a member of the Romanian team that won the World Championship title in 1997 and 1999, was at the center of a similar scandal in 1999 when she posed nude for the Romanian edition of Playboy magazine.
Former European champions Celtic exited the UEFA Champions League in the qualifiers after a 3-2 penalty shoot-out defeat at Kazakhstan’s Kairat Almaty on Tuesday, following two goalless legs in the playoff tie. Kairat are to compete in the competition proper for the first time, while Norway’s Bodo/Glimt and Cyprus’s Pafos also secured debut appearances after coming through the playoffs. Celtic’s night ended in disappointment as they missed three penalties in the shoot-out, Daizen Maeda failing with the decisive spot-kick. The slugfest of a match went into extra-time with neither side finding the net and few overall chances, echoing the first
Rangers on Wednesday bowed out of the UEFA Champions League playoffs with a humiliating 6-0 defeat at the hands of Club Brugge which piles further pressure on head coach Russell Martin, while SL Benfica secured a place in the competition proper at the expense of Jose Mourinho’s Fenerbahce. The Glasgow giants traveled to Belgium right up against it after losing 3-1 at home in last week’s first leg, when they conceded three times in the opening 20 minutes. They never looked like turning the tie around as Club Brugge took the lead inside five minutes at the Jan Breydelstadion through Nicolo Tresoldi
Noah Lyles on Thursday warmed up for the upcoming athletics world championships by chasing down Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo to win the 200m at the Diamond League final. Lyles trailed Tebogo at the start, but gradually erased the deficit over the final 100m and pipped the Botswana sprinter to the line by centimeters. Lyles, the Olympic 100m champion and reigning world champion in both the 100m and 200m, clocked 19.74 seconds in a slight headwind. Tebogo was 0.02 seconds behind. It was Lyles’ sixth Diamond League title, a record for track athletes. “Six, that’s a big number,” Lyles said. “Shoot, that’s another record on
Australian Alex de Minaur reached the second week of the US Open for the third year in a row with little fanfare on Saturday and said he intended to keep winning until the tournament organizers were forced to give him better billing. Despite being the eighth seed and a quarter-finalist last year at Flushing Meadows, De Minaur’s third-round match against German Daniel Altmaier was scheduled for Court 17 — the smallest of the four stadium venues in the precinct. “It is a little bit of a headscratcher for me. I’m not gonna lie,” he told reporters after progressing 6-7 (9/7), 6-3, 6-4,
RSS