■NEW ZEALAND
Kiwis bring barista to Beijing
New Zealand’s Olympic team have brought their own barista to Beijing to satisfy athletes’ caffeine cravings. New Zealand chef de mission Dave Currie said a New Zealand Olympic Committee sponsor had released one of their employees, Julianne Frith, to help satisfy the 182-strong team’s caffeine cravings. “The feedback we got from the last couple of games is that athletes want good coffee,” he said. “Getting good coffee in Athens [in 2004], you just couldn’t, so one of the sponsors ran a competition and this young woman had to have a test and face a selection panel and she came up trumps.” Currie said he did not expect any problems with caffeine being on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s monitoring list after previously being a banned substance. “If you inject yourself with a hell of a lot of it, it is going to come up, but they tell me you wouldn’t be competing if you were drinking enough cups of coffee to be over the limit. It is an extraordinary amount and athletes are very sensitive to what may produce a positive test. We have had no concerns in the past and have no concerns now that somebody will drink 55 cups of coffee, or whatever it is, before competing.”
■SLOVENIA
Ottey to miss eighth Games
Jamaican-born sprinter Merlene Ottey has failed in her final attempt to achieve the 100m qualifying time that would have enabled her to become the first athlete to compete in eight Olympic Games. Ottey, 48, finished second at a meeting in the Slovenian city of Maribor on Tuesday, said Robert Rudelic of the Athletic Club Poljane which organized the meeting. “Conditions were bad, she had wind in her chest and she missed the qualifying time by 28 hundredths of a second,” Rudelic said. Ottey has taken part in every Olympics since the 1980 Games in Moscow. She competed for Slovenia at the 2004 Games in Athens after six Olympics with Jamaica. Her Slovenian coach Srdjan Djordjevic said Ottey was determined to continue training so she could participate in big international athletics events. “She will still train simply because she can still run very fast,” he said.
■SWEDEN
Olympic champ withdraws
Sweden’s Olympic triple jump champion Christian Olsson said on Tuesday he will miss next month’s Beijing Games after reinjuring his thigh. “The Olympics is gone, the season is gone,” Olsson was quoted as saying on the daily Expressen’s Web site after injuring his thigh muscle during a jump. The 28-year-old was making a comeback after a long injury layoff forced him to miss the indoor season and last year’s world championships in Osaka, having undergone thigh surgery.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Romero eyes history books
Rebecca Romero hopes to create a piece of history in Beijing by becoming the first British woman to win Olympic medals in two summer sports. A rowing silver medalist in Athens in the quadruple sculls, Romero has switched sports and is now one of the world’s best track cyclists. She won titles at the world track championship in March in the individual and team 3,000m pursuit just two years after first trying the sport.
“Having already competed at one Olympic Games and won a silver medal, and being the competitive so-and-so and greedy guts that I am, I would like to raise the barrier and aim to become the first athlete to win Olympic medals in two different sports,” Romero wrote on her Web site.
RECORD DEFEAT: The Shanghai-based ‘Oriental Sports Daily’ said the drubbing was so disastrous, and taste so bitter, that all that is left is ‘numbness’ Chinese soccer fans and media rounded on the national team yesterday after they experienced fresh humiliation in a 7-0 thrashing to rivals Japan in their opening Group C match in the third phase of Asian qualifying for the 2026 World Cup. The humiliation in Saitama on Thursday against Asia’s top-ranked team was China’s worst defeat in World Cup qualifying and only a goal short of their record 8-0 loss to Brazil in 2012. Chinese President Xi Jinping once said he wanted China to host and even win the World Cup one day, but that ambition looked further away than ever after a
‘KHELIFMANIA’: In the weeks since the Algerian boxer won gold in Paris, national enthusiasm is inspiring newfound interest in the sport, particularly among women In the weeks since Algeria’s Imane Khelif won an Olympic gold medal in women’s boxing, athletes and coaches in the North African nation say national enthusiasm is inspiring newfound interest in the sport, particularly among women. Khelif’s image is practically everywhere, featured in advertisements at airports, on highway billboards and in boxing gyms. The 25-year-old welterweight’s success in Paris has vaulted her to national hero status, especially after Algerians rallied behind her in the face of uninformed speculation about her gender and eligibility to compete. Amateur boxer Zougar Amina, a medical student who has been practicing for a year, called Khelif an
Crowds descended on the home of 17-year-old Chinese diver Quan Hongchan after she won two golds at the Paris Olympics while gymnast Zhang Boheng hid in a Beijing airport toilet to escape overzealous throngs of fans. They are just two recent examples of what state media are calling “toxic fandom” and Chinese authorities have vowed to crack down on it. Some of the adulation toward China’s sports stars has been more sinister — fans obsessing over athletes’ personal lives, cyberbullying opponents or slamming supposedly crooked judges. Experts say it mirrors the kind of behavior once reserved for entertainment celebrities before
GOING GLOBAL: The regular season fixture is part of the football league’s increasingly ambitious plans to spread the sport to international destinations The US National Football League (NFL) breaks new ground in its global expansion strategy tomorrow when the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers face off in the first-ever grid-iron game staged in Brazil. For one night only, the land of Pele and ‘The Beautiful Game’ will get a rare glimpse into the bone-crunching world of American football as the Packers and Eagles collide at Sao Paulo’s Neo Quimica Arena, the 46,000-seat home of soccer club Corinthians. The regular season fixture is part of the NFL’s increasingly ambitious plans to spread the US’ most popular sport to new territories following previous international fixtures
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