At every turn sports leaders have talked tough on Russia while diluting punishmentsTo paraphrase Mario Balotelli, why is it always them? Was it not enough that Russia corrupted the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi with a devilish scheme that involved Federal Security Service agents passing steroid-riddled urine samples through a mouse hole before swapping them with clean urine? The act was so devious that the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, later called it “a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sports and on the Olympic Games”. Continue reading...
The mess in Beijing is not down to the court of arbitration for sport but a collective failure of coaches and organisationsThe decision to allow the Russian prodigy Kamila Valieva to take part in the women’s figure skating competition less than two months after testing positive for a banned heart medication has cast a shadow over the glamour event of the Winter Olympics that will persist for years to come, further tainting the reputation of a Beijing Games already beset by controversy.Armed with a quiver of point-gobbling quadruple jumps, the 15-year-old Valieva set the world record for combined total score in her first outing as a senior in October and has improved from there, skating with a deeper maturity and...
A look back at the history of past Games in warmer climates, plus the tale of a speed skater who had the odds against himIn 1988, shortly before the Winter Olympics got under way and amid rising concerns about the event suffering from good – which for the purposes of the Games would be bad – weather, 500 residents of Calgary with the surnames White, Winter or Snow gathered to perform a snow dance. The event concluded with them chanting “White winter snow, white winter snow, let it go!” before releasing helium balloons with their names on.It did not help: warm winds soon arrived to melt much of what snow there was, temperatures peaked at 18.1°C and 33 events had...
A stark transformation means Britain have a shot at achieving their best ever Winter Olympic medal haul in BeijingOn an island not known for its snow or ice, something is stirring. Not so long ago when Team GB turned up at the Winter Games, they left with their medal cupboard looking barren or bare. Sure, there was the occasional highlight – and those of a certain age will see Robin Cousins, Torvill and Dean and Rhona Martin in their mind’s eye – but as a winter sports country, Britain carried a distinct whiff of Eddie the Eagle: harmless and a little bit hapless.The transformation has been stark. Between 1952 and 2010, the nation won just 12 medals in 16 Winter...
Unlikely slalom victory in yet another of those sports the British conceived – then spent the next 100 years losing atIt was hard not to be charmed by Dave Ryding’s slalom victory at Kitzbühel. His story has a little of everything the British want in their favourite winter Olympians; an unlikely beginning on a dry ski slope in Pendle, a homespun background, training in a shed his father built in the back garden and a mulish stubborn streak that meant he graduated on to the elite skiing circuit when he was 28. That’s the sort of age when most people would be thinking about quitting already, and that, at 35, made him the country’s first World Cup race winner. “Ein...