The Greek Olympic Committee has acknowledged it was wrong to allow a hurdler serving a doping ban to take part in the Vancouver flame relay.

Olympic Torch Relay Commission president Spyros Zannias says Fani Halkia was included in the relay after a proposal by the Greek Olympic medalists’ association.

Zannias said his commission “was wrong to accept the proposal,” but offered no apology.

The International Olympic Committee has criticized the inclusion of Halkia, who was expelled from the 2008 Beijing Games after testing positive for steroid use. Halkia, who was banned for two years and faces a trial for steroid use, has denied knowingly taking drugs.

She was banned from the games, and in my opinion it was wrong for Halkia to be a torchbearer. Greece must certainly have other talented athletes who aren’t tainted by drug use.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki – site of atomic bombings in World War II – are teaming up to make a bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics that will emphasize world peace.

Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba and Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue announced on Sunday that they will form a joint bid committee. The mayors are founding members of the Mayors for Peace 2020 Vision Campaign, which advocates for a global ban on nuclear arms.

“The Olympics symbolize the abolition of nuclear arms and world peace, and we want to work to realize our plan to host the games,” Akiba said.

No, the Olympics have nothing to do with nuclear disarmament. If the Nobel Prize committe is determining the site of future Olympics, Nagasaki and Hiroshima may well be chosen using this argument, otherwise it is a pipe dream.

Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara warned on Wednesday the 2016 Olympics could be the last Games, with global warming an immediate threat to mankind.

Tokyo is bidding to host the 2016 summer Olympics with Chicago, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid also in the running. The International Olympic Committee will elect the winning candidate during its session on Oct. 2 in the Danish capital.

“It could be that the 2016 Games are the last Olympics in the history of mankind,” Ishihara told reporters at a Tokyo 2016 press event ahead of the vote.

“Global warming is getting worse. We have to come up with measures without which Olympic Games could not last long.

To stave off the threat global warming poses to mankind, I propose the Tokyo Governor and other Japanese officials cancel the 2016 Olympics should Tokyo be picked as the site of the games. Think of all the resources that can be used to save mankind instead of being wasted on frivolous sporting activities. Anyone agree with me?

Hat tip- Doug at Below the Beltway

The International Boxing Association has reduced the number of men’s weight categories from 11 to 10 for the 2012 London Olympics.

The move was made Monday to accommodate women’s boxing at the games, which the IOC Executive Board unanimously agreed on last month. The IOC would not allow the AIBA to add to its total number of boxers.

At the 2008 Beijing Games, there were 286 boxers — all male. In London the total will remain the same but there will be 250 male boxers and 36 female boxers.

To decrease the number of men, the AIBA condensed its four lightest weight categories into three.

The new categories will apply to all AIBA events starting in September 2010.

Now could anyone fix the farcical Olympic scoring system for boxing.

Police say former Olympic shot putter Dave Laut has been shot to death outside his Southern California home.

Sgt. Ron Whitney said the 52-year-old was at home when he and his wife heard noises in the backyard and he went outside to investigate. Shots were fired moments later, and Laut died at the scene.

International Olympic leaders selected golf and rugby Thursday for proposed inclusion in the 2016 Summer Games, rejecting bids from baseball, softball and three other sports.

The International Olympic Committee executive board narrowed the field to two from a list of seven, which also included squash, karate and roller sports.

The board will submit golf and rugby sevens — a faster-paced version of the standard 15-a-side game — for ratification by the full 106-member IOC assembly in Copenhagen in October.

“In the end, the decision came down to which two would add the most value,” IOC President Jacques Rogge told reporters.

“Golf and rugby scored high on all 33 criteria,” Rogge said, adding this was still a proposal and it needed to be validated.

Anyone who visits this blog knows how much a fan I am of golf but Olympic golf just doesn’t interest me at this time.

Beijing Olympic organizers say they made a profit out of hosting last year’s Summer Games.

According to figures released Friday by the government audit bureau, $2.8 billion was spent on organizing and staging the Games, including the Paralympic Summer Games that followed.

That compares to income of $3 billion thus far, leaving a profit of $176 million, the bureau said. The biggest chunk, accounting for 40 percent, came from broadcast and marketing rights, along with sales of tickets, souvenirs, and commemorative coins and stamps.

The organizers claim a profit but did China as whole come out ahead on the games?

The expenditure figures cover only operating expenses, leaving out spending on venues and infrastructure such as airports, roads and subways for the sprawling city of 18 million people.

Ah! Now as the late Paul Harvey said, here is the rest of the story.

According to the bureau, construction and upgrading costs for 36 new Olympic venues and 66 training facilities totaled $2.8 billion. The showpiece “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium alone ran almost $73 million over budget due to design modifications and higher prices for construction materials, coming in at a final cost of $455 million.

Infrastructure costs were met largely by the city governments of Beijing, Shanghai and other cities that hosted events, who together contributed $1.2 billion, and the central government, which kicked in $514 million. Another $146 million came through contributions from Chinese overseas, while the Olympic organizing committee and Education Ministry paid close to $585 million each.

An unidentified auditor quoted in an interview posted on the bureau’s Web site said Beijing’s operating budget was lower, adjusted for inflation, than both the one for the 2004 Athens Summer Games and that forecast for the 2012 London Olympics.

As we know auditors never get anything wrong either deliberately or by accident. If you believe that, I have a story about hard working food inspectors in China to also tell you.

The cost of staging the Olympics is commonly a cause for debate among prospective host cities, but not for Beijing, where the games enjoyed strong support from government, the public and business.

Of course the lack of debate could have something to do with Chinese dissenters being afraid to say anything because they could go to jail for expressing a different opinion.

Auburn swimming coach Richard Quick, who won 13 NCAA titles with three schools during a career that spanned four decades, has died of cancer. He was 66.

Quick coached at Auburn from 1978-82 and returned there in 2007. In between, he coached the women’s teams at Texas and Stanford. He also served as the men’s head coach at Iowa State during the 1977-78 season and the women’s head coach at SMU in 1976-77.

Karine Ruby, a former Olympic snowboarding champion who had been training to become a mountain guide, died Friday in a climbing accident on Mont Blanc. She was 31.

She retired after the 2006 Turin Olympics, where she was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the snowboardcross event.

Former Olympic boxing champion Guillermo Rigondeaux defected to the United States, 18 months after he was kicked off the Cuba team as punishment for a previous defection attempt.

Farah Colina said Tuesday her husband had no choice but to flee Cuba if he wanted to box again.

“I’m surprised on one level because he left home at the end of January saying he was going to Santiago,” Colina said, referring to the eastern city that is Cuba’s second largest. “But, on another level, I think he was obligated to do this.”

Luis de Cubas, an agent for Arena Box Promotions in the United States, confirmed that Rigondeaux was in Miami and interested in fighting. The 28-year-old boxer won bantamweight gold medals at the 2000 and 2004 Olympics.

Colina said her husband called a neighbor Saturday to say he made it to Miami. The family does not have a phone. She declined to describe his journey to the U.S., but said he sounded happy and nervous on the phone.

While Rigondeaux came to the US in an illegal fashion, he’ll be granted asylum here. Since the Clinton adminitstration the policy known as dry feet wet feet has in place. The boxer made it solid US soil, he gets to stay.

It comes as no surprise that conditions in Cuba haven’t changed under Raul Castro. Even if the Castros fell and a democratic government took its place, the island country will hardly be a prosperous paradise for those living there for some time.

Phelps collected his third win in the Water Cube in the 200m freestyle on Aug. 12 — and his third world record. “Being in lane six, I was out of the middle of the pool. I knew that if I jumped first, the guys in the middle of the pool wouldn’t be able to see me, and by the time they did, hopefully I had enough ground where I could hold them off,” he said of his record-breaking win.

Could he and Bowman have set an astoundingly high bar of not only winning eight gold medals, but of earning eight new world records in the process? With any other swimmer, the very thought would be ridiculous. But with Phelps …

Of course, Phelps won’t admit to it. But if you’re as gifted as he is in the water, and you shrug off world records as easily as a coat, no mere clocks will keep you feeling challenged — you need something to motivate you. Setting eight new marks in a single meet might do it — Phelps has already broken five world records in a meet at last year’s World championships.

He could do it, certainly.  This pool seems to be exceptionally fast and Phelps is the best swimmer in history.  Still, one would hate to win eight gold medals — or even six — and come away from the Games disappointed in one’s performance.

Tyson Gay accelerated through the first curve. Then, he started flying. Not in the figurative sense, but in an all-too-real way — a shocking sprawl to the ground that cost America’s best sprinter an Olympic spot in the 200 meters and made him look like less than a sure thing, health-wise at least, with the Beijing Games five weeks away.
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Had this been gymnastics, or a number of other sports, an injury at trials wouldn’t have ended Gay’s chance to make the Olympics in that specific event. But USA Track and Field plays it straight — top three finishers at trials make the Olympics, no exceptions.

It’s a black-and-white policy that most athletes accept, though it could end up costing the American team as much as Gay in Beijing. Gay is the defending world champion in the 100 and 200 meters.

“I don’t know any other way to do it, but it’s tough,” said Wallace Spearmon, now the favorite in Sunday’s finals. “Either you’re ready on this day or not. You can be the best athlete coming into it, and you could be sitting at home watching it from the house.”

How about a system that combines multiple events? Say, the Olympic Trials, the World Championships, and one or two other major competitions? That way, a poorly timed fall, injury, or illness would be less likely to cost an individual an opportunity for which they’ve spent a lifetime training. And Team USA would be represented by the best athletes.

Double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius won his appeal Friday and can compete for a place in the Beijing Olympics. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the 21-year-old South African is eligible to race against able-bodied athletes, overturning a ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations.

More amazing: the opponents argue that he has an unfair advantage.

Pistorius appealed to CAS, world sport’s highest tribunal, to overturn a Jan. 14 ruling by the IAAF that banned him from competing. The IAAF said his carbon fiber blades give him a mechanical advantage.

[...]

“The panel was not persuaded that there was sufficient evidence of any metabolic advantage in favor of a double-amputee using the Cheetah Flex-Foot,” CAS said. “Furthermore, the CAS panel has considered that the IAAF did not prove that the biomechanical effects of using this particular prosthetic device gives Oscar Pistorius an advantage over other athletes not using the device.”

It’s hard not to admire Pistorius, who was born without fibulas and had his legs amputated below the knee before his first birthday, and wish him all the best.

At the same time, those of us who grew up watching “The Six Million Dollar Man” and its spinoffs can certainly envision a scenario where those with prosthetic limbs do have an advantage over the “able bodied.” And what’s the standard for assessing that? No better than the best human legs ever in existence? Knowing how obsessive competitive athletes can be — survey after survey shows they’re willing to risk losing years of their life if they can win now — we might see the day when someone decides it’s worth it to have perfectly healthy legs amputated.

British Olympic chiefs are to force athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China’s appalling human rights record – or face being banned from travelling to Beijing.

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The controversial clause has been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbids them from making any political comment about countries staging the Olympic Games.

It is contained in a 32-page document that will be presented to all those who reach the qualifying standard and are chosen for the team.

From the moment they sign up, the competitors – likely to include the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips and world record holder Paula Radcliffe – will be effectively gagged from commenting on China’s politics, human rights abuses or illegal occupation of Tibet.

Any athlete who refuses to sign the contract won’t be allowed to travel to Beijing this summer. I’m a advocate of free speech, having defended the rights of people to say what they want from Cindy Sheehan to Ann Coulter, but the BOA is probably within in its right under British law. With hindsight the wisest course of action would have never been to award China the Olympics in the first place till they got their house in order. Needless to say I don’t think this summer will be anything like Berlin 1936.

LAUSANNE, Switzerland – The IOC formally stripped Marion Jones of her five Olympic medals Wednesday, wiping her name from the record books following her admission that she was a drug cheat.

The International Olympic Committee also banned the disgraced American athlete from attending next year’s Beijing Olympics in any capacity and said it could bar her from all future games.

Jones had already handed back the three gold medals and two bronze she won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Last month, the International Association of Athletics Federations erased all of Jones’ results dating to September 2000, but it was up to the IOC to formally disqualify her and erase her Olympic medals.

The decision was announced by IOC president Jacques Rogge at the end of a three-day executive board meeting.

Jones won gold medals in the 100 meters, 200 meters and 1,600-meter relay in Sydney, and bronze in the long jump and 100-meter relay. She was the first female track and field athlete to win five medals at a single Olympics.

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The IOC postponed a decision on redistributing her medals, including whether to strip her American relay teammates and whether to upgrade doping-tainted Greek sprinter Katerina Thanou to gold in the 100.

The IOC’s move comes as no surprise. One thing I find intersiting is Jones not being to be at any future Olympics. Can she still attend the games as a spectator or does it just forbid her from associating with athletes?

Also the IOC postponed any decision to take away Jones’ relay teammates medals. I don’t see how they can take Jones while not taking the others. This sounds unfair to the gold medalists, but the IOC can’t just go half way in my opinion.