sportsevent:the winter olympics

Whatever Happened to Eddie the Eagle, Britain’s Most Lovable Ski Jumper? | History | Smithsonian
▻https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/whatever-happened-to-eddie-eagle-britains-most-lovable-ski-jumper-18

https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/EXP673eBlvgaWGRCkjdSk38Xrpc=/800x600/filters:no_upscale():focal(536x280:537x281)/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/5d/63/5d636317-3847-4fda-825c-9a6a2f073543/03-eddie-the-eagle.jpg

A quarter century ago British plasterer-turned-ski jumper Michael Edwards made a name for himself—Eddie the Eagle—by not skiing or jumping very well at the Winter Olympics in Calgary. Short on talent but long on panache and derring-do, he had no illusions about his ability, no dreams of gold or silver or even bronze. Blinking myopically behind the bottle glass of his pink-and-white-rimmed glasses, he told the press: “In my case, there are only two kinds of hope—Bob Hope and no hope.”

Undeterred, Edwards sluiced on. Wearing six pairs of socks inside hand-me-down ski boots, he stepped onto the slopes, pushed off down the steep ramp and rag-dolled through the air. When he touched down, broadcasters chorused: “The Eagle has landed!” By taking a huge leap of faith, Edwards captured the world’s imagination and achieved the sort of renown that can only come overnight.

On this particular afternoon, a crowd of roughly three has massed in the driveway of Edwards’ duplex, where the Eagle has donned old ski togs. He shields his eyes from the low, fierce English sun and holds forth on his brilliant career.

“When I started competing, I was so broke that I had to tie my helmet with a piece of string,” he says. “On one jump the string snapped, and my helmet carried on farther than I did. I may have been the first ski jumper ever beaten by his gear.”

68 Eddie The Eagle Edwards - Ski Jump 1
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2LVihKXFwM

#sport #UK #wtf

Mystery in Sochi Doping Case Lies With Tamper-Proof Bottle - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/sports/russia-doping-bottles-olympics-2014.html

The bottles, used for testing at the Olympics since the Sydney Games in 2000, are made by #Berlinger, a Swiss company founded in 1865 as a mechanical cotton weaving mill. Until this week, they were largely ignored vessels in the global fight against doping.

Now they are prominent characters in an extraordinary ploy that affected the results of the Winter Olympics, according to Grigory Rodchenkov, who ran Russia’s antidoping laboratory for a decade. His accounts of the doping operation were first reported by The New York Times this week.

Berlinger’s bottles were first presented to the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission in the late 1990s, in a meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, said Andrea Berlinger, the sixth generation of her family to run the company.

Dr. Catlin, then a member of that commission, recalled that the Berlingers showcased various bottle designs to a roomful of doctors. “All of us were particularly pleased and excited by this bottle,” he said, “because it looked pretty bulletproof.”

Russian officials somehow figured out a way to remove the cap without breaking it, he said, enabling him to replace the steroid-tainted urine of top athletes with clean urine, stockpiled in soda bottles and other containers in the months leading up to the Games.

“We’re all a bit speechless, to be honest,” Ms. Berlinger said Friday. “We’re seeing a lot of support. No one can believe it.”
[…]
The only way to open the bottle, according to Berlinger, is to use a special machine sold by the company for about $2,000; it cracks the bottle’s cap in half, making it apparent that the sample has been touched.

Dr. Rodchenkov said that for at least 15 Russian athletes who won medals at Sochi, both the A and B samples were substituted before they were tested. None of the bottles’ caps — which are branded with unique seven-digit codes — showed any signs of having been opened.

Each night at Sochi, Dr. Rodchenkov said, sealed bottles were passed through a hole in the wall of the storage closet that served as his shadow laboratory. The bottles were handed to a man who he believed worked for the Russian intelligence service, the F.S.B. Within two hours, he said, those same bottles were returned to him, their caps unlocked.

“Magicians were on duty,” Dr. Rodchenkov said, suspecting that F.S.B. officers had studied the toothed metal rings that lock the bottle when the cap is twisted shut. According to him, they collected hundreds of them leading up to the Olympics.

Dr. Catlin theorized that heat had been applied to remove the bottles’ caps.

He said he had expressed some concern about the bottles years ago, asking if they could be outfitted with internal thermometers, to show if the sample had been frozen or heated. “But that’s just a wild guess,” he said.

#tamper-proof or not ?

Sochi 2014: 10 motion blur shots at the Winter Olympics – in pictures | Sport | theguardian.com
▻http://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2014/feb/21/sochi-2014-10-motion-blur-shots-at-the-winter-olympics-in-pictures?CMP=

Using a slow shutter-speed to suggest motion is a common technique, but it’s a good one. Here are 10 shots from the Games which have made the most of motion blur

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/2/21/1392985076490/8e8c6a00-ffba-42ab-8a80-16c99a759b9f-620x392.jpeg

#Sochi-2014
#Winter-Olympics
#pictures

Foreign hand suspected in #Volgograd bombing
▻http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/foreign-hand-suspected-in-volgograd-bombing/article5577170.ece

More than two weeks after a double suicide bombing killed 34 and injured more than 60 people in the Russian city of Volgograd on New Year eve nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Chechen rebel warlord Doku Umarov, the self-proclaimed leader of the “Caucasus Emirate” is the prime suspect. Umarov, who in the past laid claim to many high-profile terror strikes in recent years, has called for wrecking the Winter Olympics in Russia’s Sochi next month, denouncing them as “Satanist dances on the bones of our ancestors.”

Many experts also see a foreign hand in the deadly attacks.

A statement issued by the Russian Foreign Ministry heighted the speculation.

“The criminal forays in Volgograd, as well as terrorist attacks in the U.S., Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Nigeria and other countries, have been organised according to the same pattern and have the same promoters,” the statement said.

Some commentators were quick to point the finger at Saudi Arabia, which has a long history of supporting Chechen separatists in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century.

After the Volgograd blasts Russian and international media recalled that Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who made two secretive trips to Russia last year to meet President Vladimir Putin, reportedly threatened to unleash Chechen terrorists operating in Syria on Russia’s Winter Olympic if Moscow did not abandon its support for Syria’s embattled President Bashar al-Assad.

“I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year,” the Saudi spy supremo was quoted by the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir as telling Mr Putin. “The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us, and they will not move in the Syrian territory’s direction without coordinating with us.”

The Volgograd attacks came less than three weeks after Prince Bandar’s second meeting with Mr Putin.

“In the opinion of some experts the double terror strike in Volgograd has a Syrian origin and means that Russia and Saudi Arabia had failed to come to agreement,” said Dozhd (Rain), a private TV channel broadcasting from Moscow.

“There is no documented proof of the reports [about Prince Bandar’s threat], but there is neither any doubts that Wahhabi terrorism in Russia has been receiving support from the Persian Gulf Salafi regimes, above all Saudi Arabia,” Russia’s mainstream Izvestia daily said.

#terrorisme

Violente exploitation des travailleurs immigrés en Russie

Brutal exploitation of immigrant labor in Russia - World Socialist Web Site

▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/15/russ-m15.html

Brutal exploitation of immigrant labor in Russia
By Clara Weiss
15 March 2013

The human rights organization Human Rights Watch released a report in early February documenting the criminal exploitation of immigrant workers employed in the preparations for the 2014 Olympic Winter Games.

Russia has been preparing the Winter Olympics in Sochi on the Black Sea for years. Tens of thousands of workers, including about 16,000 immigrant workers, are building luxury hotels and the infrastructure required for the games.

#migrations #russie #travail

Migration Russie Caucase nord Cosaques

Russian to Use Cossacks Against North Caucasus Migrants - NYTimes.com

►http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/world/europe/russian-to-use-cossacks-to-repel-muslim-migrants.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimesg

Russian Governor Signs Up Cossacks to Police Migrants
By ELLEN BARRY
Published : August 3, 2012

MOSCOW — The governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region, which will host the Winter Olympics in 2014, has enlisted the area’s Cossacks as an auxiliary police force, urging them to prevent darker-skinned Muslims from the North Caucasus from moving there.
Alexander Aleshkin/Epsilon, via Getty Images

The governor, Aleksandr Tkachev, in a speech to law enforcement officers on Thursday, announced that as of September, 1,000 Cossacks would be paid from the budget to maintain public order. In the speech, he said the Cossacks — whose paramilitary forces served the czars — could take measures beyond what the police were allowed.