London Olympics: Lithuania beat Nigeria 72-53 in men’s basketball game

Lithuania beat Nigeria 72-53 in the men’s basketball Group A game on Tuesday as the D’Tigers lost to the Lithuanian team when they met in pool play at the London Olympics.
The Europeans avenged their Olympic Qualifying Tournament loss to Nigeria earlier this month with the victory to improve to 2-0 in pool play thus far.
Toronto Raptors forward Linas Kleiza led a balanced scoring effort with 13 points and six rebounds while teammate Darius Songaila, a bit player for the majority of his eight NBA seasons spent with five different teams, scored 12 points.
Rimantas Kaukenas, a Euroleague veteran, rounded out Lithuania’s double-digit scorers with 10 points as Jonas Valanciunas scored four points in the blowout victory.
The two teams stayed fairly close in the first half, but Nigeria’s inability to knock down jumpers-making just one of their 16 three-point attempts-eventually did them in as they were unable to recapture the magic that allowed them to defeat Lithuania (and subsequently earn their Olympic berth) at last month’s qualifying tournament in Venezuela.
The Lithuanian team which took bronze in 1992, 1996 and 2000 settled for fourth in 2004 and 2008.
Lithuania’s next match will be against France on Thursday morning whereas Nigeria faces another difficult match against LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and the rest of Team USA on Thursday night.
Results Table
STANDINGS
P W L F   A   Pts
1. Lithuania 2 1 1 151 155 3
2. Nigeria     2 1 1 113 128 3
3. U.S.           1 1 0 98  71     2
4. Argentina 1 1 0 102 79  2
5. Tunisia       1 0 1 56  60  1
6. France        1 0 1 71  98  1

Britain still on course for Gold medal rush- BOA

The Olympic association of host country Britain in the on-going Olympic tournament in London said the GB team are still on course for medal rush especially the old medal category, a category that determines the position on medals table.
This media stunt was called for after a mixed up start by the host as the Host country could only manage to win two silver medals during the midday of day four of the tournament and the much-awaited gold medal is still not on their record till this moment.
The Olympic association of Britain is however optimistic in the clinching of the gold medals said BOA chef de mission Andy Hunt saying further that the team is confident in mentality so it does make sense if the team is not delivering.
The men’s team artistic gymnastics competition earned them a Bronze in what was tagged a fantastic result, and it was celebrated overnight and this morning while weightlifter Zoe Smith got a new British record and according to Andy Hunt, it is an historic outcome of a medal for the first time as it was a first in the event for a century.
Four years ago Team GB won 19 gold medals at the Beijing Olympics and with that they finished fourth on the medal table.
Hunt was however hopeful that there are still medal opportunities coming from Rowing, track cycling, time trial, sailing, triathlon, open-water swimming.
Team GB are being headed by Australia who has been tagged as arch-rival of the Britain as they have been able to get a gold medal and they hope that that won’t take long to change.

Arsenal’s Almunia leaves to join Zola at Watford

Goalkeeper Manuel Almunia has joined English Championship side Watford, his former club Arsenal said on Tuesday.
Almunia is one of seven new signings made by manager Gianfranco Zola and joins the London club on a one-year deal.
“Former Arsenal goalkeeper Manuel Almunia has signed for Watford,” the Premier League club confirmed on its website (www.arsenal.com).
“The 35-year-old was released by the club this summer but will be training next door to his former team-mates in London Colney after agreeing a one-year deal with the Championship (second division) side.”
Almunia played 175 games for Arsenal including a substitute appearance in the 2006 Champions League final against Barcelona, but lost the jersey to Pole Wojciech Szczesny.
Watford were recently taken over by the Pozzo family who own Italian Serie A club Udinese and Spanish La Liga club Granada.
Other new arrivals include QPR defender Fitz Hall and several loan acquisitions from the fellow Pozzo family stable of clubs.
Almen Abdi, Matej Vydra and Steve Leo Beleck joined from Udinese on-loan as have Granada pair Daniel Pudil and Ikechi Anya.

London Olympics: Regina George re-admitted after dope clearance

One of Nigeria’s female athlete at the on-going London Olympic Games, Regine George, has been re-admitted to participate in the games after passing a second drug test.
Regina was banned two weeks ago alongside two other Nigerian athletes, Vivian Chukwuemeka and Lauretta Ozoh, after their blood samples tested positive to banned drugs.
Regina was however cleared after she passed the mandatory second test in surrey, United Kingdom and has now returned to the Games Village to join Team Nigeria.
Confirming the development to Punch newspaper, the medical doctor for Team Nigeria, Dr. Kenneth Anugweje, stated that Regina was cleared after hearings by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
She will now compete in the 400m and 4x400m races.
Ozoh and Chukwuemeka failed the second test and they have both been asked to leave the camp immediately.
Ozoh was expected to compete in 100m, 200m and 4x100m, Chukwuemeka who holds Africa and Commonwealth record for shot put entered the games in the shot put category.

Kano Pillars seek postponement of Fed-Cup semi final

The management of Kano Pillars is seeking shift of their Federation Cup semi-final owing to the invitation of star players Gabriel Reuben and Papa Idris for the Super Eagles international friendly against Niger republic.
The two players are among the home-based Super Eagles called up for the August 15th clash against the West Africans in Niamey.
The date for the friendly also coincides with that of the semi-final of the oldest club competition in Nigeria.
The club’s management said the absence of the players could deplete their squad in the semi-final cracker against fellow Nigeria Premier League contenders Lobi Stars of Makurdi.

IOC orders Segun Toriola and other defeated athletes to leave Olympic city in 48 hours

The International Olympics Committee (IOC) has issued a 48-hour deadline to athletes who were eliminated to quit London.
IOC’s communications director Mark Adams said the move is necessary to allow for effective monitoring of the remaining participants and ensure security for the on-going global sporting showpiece.
This development means team Nigeria’s table tennis quartet of Segun Toriola, Aruna Quadri, Funke Oshinaike and Offiong Edem would leave the games after they exited their events.
Also team Nigeria’s boxing duo of Muyideen Akanji and Lukman Lawal are also affected by the order after they suffered shock ousters from the games.
Medals table
Meanwhile, China is gradually pulling away at the top of the medals table with a total of 17 medals comprising 9 gold, 5 silver and 3 bronze medals.
The United States is trailing with 5 gold, 7 silver and 5 bronze medals a total of 17 medals.
France has overtaken Italy to third on the table with 3 gold, 1 silver and 3 bronze; a total of 7 medals.
And North Korea leapt above their South Korean counterparts to the fourth spot with 3 gold and 1 bronze medal; a total of 4 medals so far.

Forging of the Mandarin mermaid: How Chinese children are taken away from their families and brutalised into future Olympians

• Chinese state earmarks potential champions from young age
• Youngsters are sent away to gruelling training camps
• Olympic champion Ye Shiwen said her extraordinary swim was a result of 'hard work and training'

Watching the new ‘Mandarin Mermaid’ glide to another suspiciously easy victory yesterday - the prelude to what will doubtless be her second gold medal of these Games - my thoughts returned to the disturbing interview I conducted with another swimming sensation many years ago.

Just like China’s Ye Shiwen, East German Petra Schneider had astonished the world in winning the 400 metres medley - this time at the 1980 Moscow Olympics - producing a performance of such awesome power that her rivals (including Britain’s Sharron Davis, who won silver) seemed to be lesser mortals.

And as with 16-year-old Ye in London on Saturday night, so striking was Schneider’s superiority over young women who had trained equally long and hard that many observers wondered how she could possibly have been so much stronger, fitter and faster.

Winning at all costs: Children are put through their paces doing punishing exercises to toughen them up

Children are trained at camps where the word 'gold' is hung on the wall to make them focus on success

Sweat and tears: A young girl is pushed through a tough gymnastics exercise

This disquieting question cast a shadow over her achievement for 18 years. But then, during that unforgettable interview, in her cramped apartment in Chemnitz - or Karl-Marx-Stadt as it had been known when she was among the stars of the East German state swimming project - the five-time world record-holder finally came clean.

 

Having been identified as a potential champion as a little girl, she told me, she had been removed from school and placed in a ruthless training camp where she was identified by a number, Sportsperson 137, rather than a name.

There her every waking hour was devoted to bringing swimming glory to her country.
To increase her oxygen uptake she was forced to swim for hour upon hour in a vacuum contraption that sucked out the surrounding air; she was fed like a battery-farm turkey on a protein-rich diet; and, of course, she was injected with steroids - so frequently that, even then in her mid-30s, she suffered a plethora of health problems.

‘Sharron Davies was not racing against another swimmer that day - she was racing against a different species,’ she told me tearfully in an extraordinary mea culpa which later saw her ask for her world records to be expunged. ‘I was programmed to take the gold.’
Was the equally invincible Ye Shiwen similarly programmed? As with everyone who marvelled at the way she eased through the water yesterday, like a killer whale in her white cap and black costume, I hope — oh, how I hope — she was not.
Yet recalling the photographs Schneider had showed me of herself at a similar age, one well understands the fears voiced by America’s top swimming coach.
Indeed, they must have flashed through the minds of even the most casual spectator yesterday, so much stronger did she look than the young women beside her.

Ye Shiwen astounded the swimming world by knocking more than a second off the world record for the 400m individual medley

Mission accomplished: Miss Ye poses with her gold medal on the podium. Ye insists that her 'results come from hard work and training'

Ye Shiwen possesses that same masculine, almost wall-like figure; the same impossibly wide shoulders and huge, rounded thighs; the same armchair-leg calves. Rebecca Adlington is a strong woman, to be sure, but she still looks feminine; Ye, though barely out of adolescence, appears androgynous.
China’s recent swimming history mitigates against Ye, too.

Ye Shiwen was picked out because she had an unusually masculine physique with extremely large hands and long limbs

For during recent years its swimmers and coaches have been caught cheating so many times it is difficult to keep count - and it has modelled its draconian training system on precisely that which produced Schneider and other turbo-charged East Germans before the Iron Curtain fell.
It began in the Eighties when, determined to end the nation’s perennial humiliation at major athletics and swimming championships, China’s Communist regime decreed that a generation of future champions must be harvested and honed.
To that end, school teachers were ordered to scrutinise their pupils for signs of natural sporting ability and report any child with obvious potential to regional coaches who would install them in one of 3,000 new state training camps.

According to her mother, Qing Dingyi, as quoted by the Chinese state media, little Ye ‘expressed a wish to become a swimmer at the tender age of seven’.
In truth, she was picked out because she had an unusually masculine physique with extremely large hands and long limbs: attributes at first thought best suited to a career in track and field.

Young boys and girls are put through their paces at the Chen Jinglun Sports School, the alma mater of Ye Shiwen

The school also trained Sun Yang, who won the 400m freestyle at London 2012

After being whisked away from her modest two-bedroom apartment, in Hangzhou, a city of 6.2 million, and installed into the Chen Jingluin sports school, however, it was decided she would be best suited to swimming, and by 11 she had won her first major junior championship.

Her mother insists she and her husband, a manual worker, had always impressed on her that ‘results are not important, but you should always enjoy the taking part’. One doubts she dares voice this opinion in the presence of her daughter’s coaches.

In swimming, as in most other Olympic sports, they enforce a regime so relentlessly harsh that it has been compared, by those few Western observers who have managed to penetrate the obsessive secrecy with which it is guarded, to that in some 19th-century prisons.
Indeed, after being shown how China’s child gymnasts are trained some years ago, in his capacity as an Olympic observer, Britain’s Olympic gold-winning oarsman Sir Matthew Pinsent - a man who knows a thing or two about pushing the human body to its limits - pronounced it a ‘pretty disturbing experience’.

Practice makes perfect: Children are put through their paces in a training session at Chen Jinglun Sports School

Some have likened the strict training regime to life in '19th-century prisons'

Children who our own sports authorities would deem far too young even to countenance focusing seriously on one sport, let alone be taken away from their parents and billeted in these boot-camps, had been driven so hard that they wept, and one claimed to have been beaten by his coach.
The International Olympic Committee promised then to investigate his claims but seven years on there is no evidence that anything has remotely changed.
Only last January harrowing photographs were posted on the internet showing Chinese children crying in pain as they were put to work.
In case they had forgotten why they were there, a large sign on the wall reminded them. ‘GOLD’ it said simply.

Virtual brainwashing of this sort is another feature of the state sports project, whose charges are taught by rote that their mission in life is to beat the Americans and all-comers to the top of the podium.
Their child stars of the future are also taught from the earliest age to deliver vapid answers to media questions - though there are signs that the current generation of Olympians, emboldened and awakened, perhaps, by increasing contact with the West via social media websites, are starting to rebel.
Indeed, this week one of Ye’s swimming team-mates, 23-year-old Lu Ying, risked serious repercussions back in Beijing by attacking China’s grindingly repetitive coaching regime and saying how much she preferred the freer, more enjoyable system in Australia, where she was permitted to train prior to the Games.

Recently, other former Chinese athletes have broken ranks, describing how they were so rigidly programmed in the sports camps that they could barely fend for themselves when their athletic careers ended, much less find jobs and integrate with their peers.

Starting young: Olympic champions Sun Yang and Ye Shiwen were earmarked from a young age as potential future champions

The school recruits about 900 children from kindergartens in Hangzhou each year, with their parents all but forced to accept their fate

Had she not won gold, and become a pampered darling of the Communist Party, that would have been the life that awaited Ye. We are told, again by state-controlled newspapers, that she is never happier than when painting her mother’s toenails, reading detective stories, and chatting to friends on her pink mobile.

'Sharron Davies was not racing against another swimmer that day - she was racing against a different species: I was programmed to take the gold.'

Petra Schnedier, East German swimmer,
who was found guilty of doping

Perhaps so, but for the past six years she has lived in a Spartan dorm with five other swimming hopefuls.

At seven she could already perform 20 chin-ups - an exercise beyond the capability of most fit adults. She swims every day for several hours - only getting a break when the pool ‘needs cleaning’ according to one of her coaches, Wei Wei.

She will also have been drilled remorselessly in the niceties that can make a difference in big competition: keeping a fixed facial expression, behaving impeccably in view of the judges, showing no weakness or pain.
Her only consolation is that her diet will be far more nourishing than that of an ordinary Chinese teenager.

Food and legal supplements apart, though, the question gnaws away — is she being propelled by some other, more sinister fuel?

Ye's team-mate, 23-year-old Lu Ying, this week attacked China's grindingly repetitive coaching regime

A group of young boys await their turn in the pool

Banned: Last month 16-year-old Li Zhesi was expelled from the Chinese team after being caught using the performance-enhancing drug EPO

If so, she will join an infamous shoal of Chinese swimmers dating back to the 1994 World Aquatic championships in Rome, when their performance in winning 12 of the 16 gold medals available was attributed by state officials to ingesting an ‘ancient brew’ of toad-skin and bird’s nests.

Not long afterwards, at the Asian Games, 11 of their number tested positive for a banned testosterone and China was stripped of nine of its 23 golds.

Further scandals followed at regular intervals throughout the Nineties and 2000s, including the discovery, in 1998, of 13 vials of a human growth hormone - enough to supply the entire team - in the kitbag of a female Chinese swimmer during a routine search at Sydney airport.

That was the incident which prompted Schneider to tell me about her drug abuse, which she said had been forced on her in ignorance by her coach.
And only six weeks ago another Chinese swimmer, 16-year-old Li Zhesi, was expelled from the team after being caught using the current performance enhancing drug of choice among swimmers: a substance called EPO which boosts red blood-cells to increase oxygen uptake.

She was caught, as the Chinese will doubtless point out, by their own anti-doping agency, set up before the Beijing Games as part of an avowed intent to make them clean.

Chen Jinglun Sports School: At seven Ye could already perform 20 chin-ups - an exercise beyond the capability of most fit adults

'I was programmed to take the gold': East Germany's Petra Schneider says she would have swapped her medal for Sharron Davies's soft, feminine looks

Whether or not she was a patsy, sacrificed to create an impression of vigilance so that others with better hopes of a medal in London (such as Ye) could slip through the net, as some cynics here were suggesting yesterday, remains to be seen.

As I say, I hope and pray this isn’t the case - and not only because of the damage that any exposure as a cheat would do to these Games.
When I met Petra Schneider, she was suffering from rigid musculature, which had forced her to give birth to her only child by Caesarean section, and also an irregular heartbeat, abnormally high cholesterol and constant back pain.
Having grown an Adam’s apple and developed a manly jaw, she had also been deprived of her femininity, and told me she would willingly have swapped her gold medal for Sharron Davies’s soft, feminine looks.
That is the price Sportsperson 137 paid for her moment of glory.
We must hope that the Mandarin Mermaid will never have a similar  story to tell.