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Tag: Olympics

  • North Korea will take part in next two Olympics – IOC chief

    North Korea will take part in the next two Olympic Games in Japan and China, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach said on Saturday after meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang.

    Bach traveled to Pyongyang on Thursday in a visit that comes after North Korea’s participation in the Pyeongchang Winter Games helped ease tensions over the Korean peninsula.

    Speaking to reporters at Beijing airport upon his return, Bach said North Korea will participate in the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.

    “This commitment was fully supported by the supreme leader of the DPRK in a very open and fruitful discussion I had with him yesterday,” Bach said, using the country’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
    “The IOC will make a proposal for a potential joint march or potential other joint activities for Tokyo and then maybe also for Beijing at the appropriate time,” he added.

    The North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Bach told Kim the trip was to “express the most heartfelt thanks” to North Korea’s leader for helping make February’s the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics a Games that were “symbolic of peace.”

    Athletes from North and South Korea marched under a unified peninsula flag at the opening ceremony in Pyeongchang, and the two Koreas have seen a significant thaw in tensions since.

    KCNA said Kim expressed thanks for the IOC’s support and for cooperating with North Korea “regardless of any political climate and conditions”.

    He said he hoped that the IOC’s relationship with the North’s Olympic Committee would continue to develop favorably and expected cooperation in developing and improving sport in North Korea, the report added.

    An official from South Korea’s Unification Ministry said it was aware of the KCNA’s report but declined to comment further.

    Bach had accepted North Korea’s invitation in February, and told Reuters at the time that he saw sports as a way to reduce political tensions.

    After Kim made a surprise trip this week to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, his engagement with the international community has sparked speculation he may try to meet other leaders ahead of summits with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and United States President Donald Trump.

    The two Koreas have experienced a significant easing in tensions since the Winter Olympics in South Korea in February, leading them to set a date to hold their first summit in more than a decade on April 27.

    Reuters

  • Winter Olympics: USA beat Canada on penalties to win women’s ice hockey gold

    The United States beat Canada 3-2 in a sudden-death shootout to win Winter Olympics gold in the women’s ice hockey for the first time in 20 years.

    The scores were level at 2-2 after five penalty shots each, but USA’s Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson scored past Shannon Szabados before Maddie Rooney saved from Canada’s Meghan Agosta.

    Canada won gold at the previous four Olympics, including victories over USA in the 2002, 2010 and 2014 finals.

    The game had ended 2-2 after overtime.

    Hillary Knight opened the scoring for USA but Haley Irwin and Marie-Philip Poulin put Canada ahead before Monique Lamoureux-Morando took the match into overtime in Pyeongchang.

    USA beat Canada in the first women’s ice hockey Winter Olympic final in 1998.

     

    BBC

  • Winter Olympics: 100 volunteers against assigned jobs quit Olympic

    The PyeongChang Organising Committee says around 100 volunteers have quit working at the Pyeongchang Olympics because they didn’t like their assigned jobs.

    Organising committee spokesperson Nancy Park said Monday that the absences didn’t harm the running of the Games.

    “This is because we selected more than we needed, with 14,000 volunteers in action from 90,000 applications from around the world,” she said.

    The spokeperson said the 100 “came, didn’t like it and left again.”

    Park acknowledged that volunteers had complained about issues such as “snacks and transportation” and also voiced them to the Blue House, the residence of the nation’s President, Moon Jae In.

    Volunteers, who are not paid apart from accommodation and receiving the official uniform, are crucial for the running of any Games.

    “We are trying to take care of their needs. They are the face of the Games and very important for us,” Park said.

  • Winter Olympics cyber-attack: Security researchers uncovers malware

    Some security researchers in the United States have been reported to have uncovered the malware that struck the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

    Organizers of the Winter Olympics on Sunday confirmed the games fell victim to a cyber-attack during the opening ceremony of the games on Friday, but refused to reveal the source.

    Researchers with cybersecurity firms Cisco Systems, CrowdStrike and FireEye said in blog posts on Monday that they had analysed computer code they believed was used in the Friday’s attack.

    All three security companies pointed to ‘Olympic Destroyer’ malware, and said it was designed to knock computers offline by deleting critical system files, which would render the machines useless.

    The three firms said they did not know who was behind the attack.

    “Disruption is the clear objective in this type of attack and it leaves us confident in thinking that the actors behind this were after embarrassment of the Olympic committee during the opening ceremony,” Cisco said in its blog.

    The attack took the Olympics website offline, which meant that some people could not print out tickets and WiFi used by reporters covering the games did not work during the opening ceremony, according to Cisco.

    The attack did not affect the performance of drones, which were initially scheduled to be included in the opening ceremony, but later pulled from the program, organizers said in a statement.

    The drone light show was cancelled because there were too many spectators standing in the area where it was supposed to take place, the statement said.

     

  • Sweden’s Kalla wins first gold medal of 2018 Winter Olympics

    Charlotte Kalla of Sweden has won the first gold medal at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.

     

    The result was announced on the Pyeongchang Olympics twitter handle @pyeongchang2018 on Saturday.

     

    Kalla participated in the cross-country skiing event for ladies where Norway’s Marit Bjoergen and Finland’s Krista Parmakoski received silver and bronze medals respectively.

     

    The tournament which began on Friday will end on Feb. 25

    Olympic: Ban on 47 Russian athletes and coaches upheld

     

  • Olympic: Ban on 47 Russian athletes and coaches upheld

    The Court of Arbitration for Sport has dismissed an appeal by 47 Russian athletes and coaches against a ban on participation in the Winter Olympics.

    The Russians had argued that they had been wrongfully excluded from the Games by the International Olympic Committee.

    The decision was made just hours before Friday’s opening ceremony.

    It comes amid a long-running row over Russian doping which has seen the country banned from the games, but 169 Russians will compete as independents.

    The group contesting the decision included 28 athletes who had life bans from the Olympics lifted by the IOC last week, when CAS ruled there was insufficient evidence they had benefited from a system of state-sponsored doping.

    In the aftermath of that decision, the IOC decided not to extend an invitation to those with overturned bans – saying the decision “had not lifted the suspicion of doping”.

    That led to a last-minute appeal for entry on Wednesday and Thursday.

    But in its decision to uphold the ban on entry to the Pyeongchang Games, the CAS panel did not find that the IOC process was “discriminatory, arbitrary or unfair”.

    As a result, none of the affected athletes will compete in the 2018 Winter Olympics, which run from 9 to 25 February in South Korea.

    The 169 sportspeople who have been invited to attend will compete under the banner of “Olympic athletes from Russia” and will fly the Olympic flag rather than the Russian one.

    If they win any medals, the Olympic anthem will be played.

    The ban on Russia was handed down after an investigation into state-sponsored doping during the 2014 Winter Olympics, which were held in Sochi in Russia.

  • Pope praises joint Korean Olympic teams

    Pope praises joint Korean Olympic teams

    Pope Francis said on Wednesday the participation of North Korean athletes in the Olympics raised hopes for reconciliation on the Korean peninsula and that the Vatican was ready to back any peace initiative.

    “The traditional Olympic truce acquires special importance this year,” he told pilgrims and tourists at his weekly general audience.

    Delegations from the two Koreas will march together under a single flag and athletes will compete as a single team in some sports at the Winter Games starting on Friday in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

    The Pontiff said: “this allows for hope for a world where conflicts can be resolved peacefully through dialogue and reciprocal respect, as sport teaches us to do.

    “May these Olympics be a great feast of friendship and sport.”

    He said that the Vatican was ready to back any “useful peace initiative that favors peace and encounter among peoples”.

    Francis has in the past called on all nations to support dialogue to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula and to work for a legally binding ban on nuclear weapons..

    In 2017, he said a third country, such as Norway, should try to mediate the dispute between North Korea and Washington, to cool a situation that had become “too hot” and posed the risk of nuclear devastation.

    The pope, who is a soccer fan, said he would be accompanying the Games with his prayers.

     

  • Russian doping: IOC bans Russia from 2018 Winter Olympics

    Russia has been banned from competing at next year’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang by the International Olympic Committee.But Russian athletes who can prove they are clean would be allowed to compete in South Korea under a neutral flag.

    It follows an investigation into allegations of state-sponsored doping at the 2014 Games hosted by Russia in Sochi.

    “This should draw a line under this damaging episode,” the IOC said.

    IOC president Thomas Bach and his board – who made the announcement in Lausanne on Tuesday – came to the decision after reading through the findings and recommendations of a 17-month investigation headed up by the former president of Switzerland, Samuel Schmid.

    The Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) has been suspended but the IOC said it will invite Russian clean athletes to compete in February under the name ‘Olympic Athlete from Russia’ (OAR).

    Despite repeated Russian denials, the Schmid report has found evidence of “the systemic manipulation of the anti-doping rules and system” which back up previous allegations of government involvement in cheating in the run-up to and during the Winter Olympics almost four years ago.

    Bach said: “This was an unprecedented attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games and sport. This should draw a line under this damaging episode and serve as a catalyst for a more effective anti-doping system.”

    The Games in South Korea, which start on 9 February, will now be without one of the powerhouses of Olympic sport.