Athlete is expected to head to Poland later after seeking protection at its embassy amid fears she would be punished if she returned home
Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya has left Japan on a Vienna-bound plane after she refused to fly home earlier this week.
The 24-year-old, who had sought refuge at the Polish embassy in Tokyo, had been expected to take a flight direct to Warsaw but switched at the last minute, an airport official told reporters.
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Pole vault: Mondo Duplantis is trying to break his own world record of 6.18m. He’s had two attempts at 6.19m.
It looked as if he had done it first time round but he clipped the bar. He didn’t come close in his second attempt. Now for the third ...
The full story as Elaine Thompson-Herah becomes the first woman in history to retain the sprint double.
Related: Elaine Thompson-Herah strikes second gold of Tokyo 2020 in 200m final
Continue reading...Tokyo Games wins in 100m and high jump in space of 11 minutes prompt outpouring of national pride
Stunned and ecstatic after claiming two gold medals in the space of 11 minutes, as Lamont Marcell Jacobs won the 100m final and Gianmarco Tamberi shared first place in the high jump, Italians have been celebrating a golden Sunday at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
“It is Italian sport’s most beautiful day,” said Giovanni Malagò, the president of the Italian Olympics Committee. “They have made history. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren will talk about it. This is better than the Eurocup,” he added, referring to Italy’s Euro 2020 football victory last month.
Continue reading...Krystsina Tsimanouskaya has not directly criticised her government but her parents warned her not to return
Just two years ago, Krystsina Tsimanouskaya was greeted by smiling Belarusian athletics and academic officials as she brandished a gold medal from the 2019 Summer Universiade, the young star’s greatest victory for her native Belarus yet.
Now that same bureaucracy is threatening to tear her life apart, as her coach and a delegation official warned a crying Tsimanouskaya on leaked audio that she was “caught in a spider’s web” and suggested that cases of “excessive pride” often lead to suicide.
Continue reading...Victory in Tokyo has reignited debate over a decades-old compromise with the island’s goliath neighbour
In the hours between Taiwan winning gold and silver in Olympic badminton on the weekend, local courts in Taipei were packed with enthusiastic young players. The nail-biting matches had lit a fire of sporting patriotism – not least because both were against China, Taiwan’s goliath neighbour, which claims Taiwan as a province it must retake.
The doubles win by Lee Yang and Wang Chi-lin was Taiwan’s second gold medal, after Kuo Hsing-Chun won in weightlifting, and added to its biggest medal haul in Olympic history. Taiwan sits 18th in the table. China is first. Nevertheless, social media was awash with celebrations.
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Hello Niall O’Keeffe:
Tubthumping is one of my favourite songs! Well done. Just curious why female track athletes are required to wear singlets that expose their midriffs. But males wear full length ones.
Women’s basketball: USA, unbeaten after two games in Group B, have started a little slowly and trail France 35-30 early in the second quarter. The French are on fire from the perimeter, hitting three after three.
Earlier today, Japan beat Nigeria 102-83 to lead Group B but the winner of USA-France will overtake the host nation.
Continue reading...The men’s gold and women’s bronze medals meant everything to Fiji, which has the highest per-capita Covid infection rate in the world
When the Fijian men’s sevens team beat New Zealand to win gold at the Tokyo Olympics on Wednesday, the entire nation celebrated.
The win could not have come at a better time. Fiji is in the grip of a deadly second outbreak of Covid-19, on top of a potential political crisis over controversial native land legislation.
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Bigntian Su (China) 9.83
Ronnie Baker (USA) 9.83
Gymnastics: Max Whitlock tells BBC he’s “lost for words”, “completely overwhelmed,” and it’s “totally surreal”. It’s been an incredible journey, he says, and retaining the gold is “a million times harder”, noting “the most pressured environment I’ve ever been in”. He’s only getting older, but “experience pays a lot” and he “can’t quite believe it”.
He doesn’t know if it helped going first. It’s easy to say with the gold around his neck now, but every gymnast knows it’s hard to go first and he had to lay down a big routine, he couldn’t wait to see what others did. He can’t believe he’s done it, but he’s done the job, scored near his target score, and knew that if someone beat it, he’d still done his job. He now has six Olympic medals and when he was younger, he only did the sport because he enjoyed it – he wasn’t aiming for or expecting medals. It “feels very, very surreal” and he thinks he’s almost going round in circles trying to make sense of it.
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... and she qualifies fastest! Runs through in 10.73, no one anywhere near her, her bright yellow and red hair streaming out behind her.
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce is in the third heat...
Man allegedly also waved colonial-era flags while watching fencer Edgar Cheung’s medal ceremony at a mall
Hong Kong police have arrested a man on suspicion of insulting the national anthem, after he allegedly booed the Chinese national anthem while watching an Olympic event at a mall.
The 40-year-old man was detained on Friday after allegedly waving colonial-era Hong Kong flags and booing, while urging others to join him in insulting the song, according to a police statement posted on Facebook.
Continue reading...Chris Dunne on the successful school sport partnership scheme that the Conservatives dismantled in 2010 – and on why good coaching is the crucial factor at any level of sport
Barney Ronay (Gold medals are illusory, world-class public facilities should be the goal, 23 July) says “the idea of a tangible legacy [from the London 2012 Olympics] was always flimflam”, but one of the most important factors in the Games being awarded to the UK was that we had already put in place the grassroots plan to ensure the legacy years before we even made the bid.
In 2002 the Labour government had created, in England, school sport partnerships (SSPs), based in 450 secondary sports colleges, each of which was responsible for hugely increasing participation in sport in both their own school and a network of local secondaries, each releasing PE specialists for half of every week to help train primary school teachers to widen the sports offer to their pupils and to deliver quality coaching. Identifying talent at the grassroots and nurturing it through to local clubs and on to county, national and Team GB participation was another very firm objective.
Continue reading...A storm broke out at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre on Friday morning when Ryan Murphy, the USA’s silver medallist in the 200m backstroke, spoke out against the sport’s doping problem and said he was “swimming in a race that’s probably not clean”. Almost any other time, this would have been an admirably honest thing to do, but the problem was Murphy had only just lost to Evgeny Rylov, representing the Russian Olympic Committee, and the comments came across as an accusation. Rylov, 24, won both the 100m and 200m backstroke this week, the 200m with an Olympic record time of 1min 53.27sec.
“I’ve got about 15 thoughts, and 13 of them would get me into a lot of trouble,” Murphy said after the race. “It is a huge mental drain to go through the year knowing that I’m swimming in a race that’s probably not clean, and that is what it is. The people that know a lot more about the situation made the decision that they did. I don’t have the bandwidth to train for the Olympics at a very high level and try to lobby the people that are making the decisions that they’re making the wrong decisions.”
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Women’s 200m breaststroke final: this is all about Tatjana Schoenmaker, who starts well but is trailing USA’s Lily King at the halfway mark.
Men’s 100m butterfly semi-final 2: Dressel dominates, not in world record time but the American obliterates Milak’s semi-final winning time of 50.31 to clock in with a blistering 49.71 ahead of Noe Ponti (SUI) and Jakub Majerski (POL). Milak held the Olympic record for all of three minutes. The USA’s Tom Shields touched home in last place.
Australia’s Matthew Temple qualifies for the final sixth fastest.
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Table tennis: The gold medal game in the women’s singles competition is an all-Chinese affair, Chen Meng against Sun Yingsha - the first and second seed. Sun won the first game though (first to seven), and leads 5-4 (first to 11) in the second. If you’re following the broadcast, the world feed commentator is a gem, bringing 10/10 enthusiasm to his task. Just as it should for a contest like this. “It’s like chess and kung fu combined... with a racket!” Love him.
Marta Martyanova, Larisa Korobeynikova, Adelina Zagidullina and Inna Deriglazova are Olympic champions, the latter holding her nerve after a late rally from the French quartet to triumph 45-34.
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We’ll have a rundown of Thursday’s early medal action shortly. But first, enjoy this lovely updated gallery from day five in Tokyo:
Related: Tokyo Olympics 2020: day five – in pictures
More fun from the 1900 “Olympics” in Paris – thanks to vastariner:
The 1900 competition in particular was strikingly odd, with competitors not realising it was part of the Olympic programme.
Continue reading...Simone Biles has withdrawn from the women’s all-around gymnastics final at the Tokyo Olympics on Thursday after a further medical evaluation determined that she is not yet ready to compete. The news followed her dramatic decision to stop competing in the women’s team event on Tuesday after only one rotation on the vault due to mental health issues.
However, a statement from US gymnastics left open the possibility that Biles, who could still compete in four more finals, may return for the individual events at the Games next week.
Continue reading...Simone Biles was forced to withdraw from the women’s team final at the Tokyo Games on Tuesday, citing mental health concerns after a difficult opening vault.
The four-times Olympic champion said that she had been struggling mentally in recent days and after the vault, she decided that she wanted to “take a back seat” in the team final and she had full faith in her teammates to win a medal.
Continue reading...Watching an Afghan refugee in the Olympics is a source of inspiration to many women in a country where riding a bike is seen as a political statement and the Taliban are gaining ground
When Masomah Ali Zada makes her Olympic debut at the women’s cycling time trial this week, speeding her way around the 22km route with Mount Fuji in the background, it won’t just be her teammates in Japan cheering her on. In Kabul, where the 25-year-old joined the national squad as a teenager, a small but gutsy group of female cyclists will be glued to the television, willing her to do the best she can.
“I’m really, really proud of her and so are all of the team members, and we are really looking forward to watching her race and seeing her do great,” says Zahla Sarmat, assistant development director of the Afghan cycling federation’s women’s division. For her and her fellow riders, Ali Zada is a source of huge inspiration, even if her sporting success eventually led her to leave Afghanistan and claim asylum in France. She is competing in Tokyo as part of the Refugee Olympic Team.
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Swimming: Onto the men’s 200m freestyle final...
Swimming: We’re in for a blockbuster 200m freestyle final. Katie Ledecky saw what Ariarne Titmus accomplished in her first semi and laid down a marker, leading from the front to win in 1.55.34. Barbora Seemanová (CZE) finished second, Italy’s incredible champion Federica Pellegrini powered home at the death to snatch third, beating out Maddy Wilson (AUS) and 14-year-old Summer McIntosh (CAN).
Wilson’s time was good enough to sneak into the final in eighth spot, but all eyes will be on another Titmus v Ledecky duel in the pool.
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An update from the hockey stadium: Team GB have secured their second win the tournament, running out 3-1 winners over underdogs Canada after a nervous start. “You have to understand when you’re playing teams that rank lower than you, they have nothing to lose. It’s a win-win for them,” said the team’s head coach Danny Kerry.
Not strictly speaking to do with the Olympics, but very much related given Paralympian Olivia Breen’s recent experience of being told what to wear, but remember the Norwegian beach handball team that was fined in a “case of improper clothing” for refusing to wear bikini bottoms during a tournament in Europe? The protest against what the team described as “very sexist” uniform rules cost them $1,500. But they might not have to fork out themselves after pop star P!nk showed her support for their cause.
I’m VERY proud of the Norwegian female beach handball team FOR PROTESTING THE VERY SEXIST RULES ABOUT THEIR “uniform”. The European handball federation SHOULD BE FINED FOR SEXISM. Good on ya, ladies. I’ll be happy to pay your fines for you. Keep it up.
Related: Time to give those in charge of female athletics short shrift | Rebecca Nicholson
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