| Bolt may quit sprinting after Olympics • Champion may switch to 400m and long jump• Says 'If I've done everything I want to do I may get out'Usain Bolt may retire from sprinting after the 2012 London Games, the triple Olympic champion said today."Definitely I will go one more Olympics for sure and from there I will decide what I want to do," the Jamaican 100 and 200 metres world champion said. "My coach may want to go to another one but we will determine how I am going because I definitely want to retire on top, like Michael Johnson."Bolt was referring to the American runner who holds the 400m world record and gave up the sport after retaining the Olympic title over that distance at the 2000 Games. "I asked him why he retired and he said he'd done everything he wanted to so there was no reason for him to continue. He was on top so I'm thinking if I'm on top and I've done everything I want to do maybe I'll get out."Bolt, who set world records in the 100m and 200m at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and then set new marks at the world championships last year, may try the 400m and the long jump."I have said the long jump but I think I'll do something else before that," said the 24-year-old. "The long jump I think would be about a year before I retire because I think it takes a toll on your body."Bolt said he had chosen to skip next month's Commonwealth Games in Delhi because it would cut into his training schedule for the 2011 world championships in Daegu, South Korea."A lot of top athletes are skipping this one because the world championships are very important," he said, adding that he expected Jamaica to dominate the sprints. "Anybody in Jamaica who decides to go is going to be good because the depth is getting bigger and there are a lot of youngsters coming up."Usain BoltAthleticsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
One hundred British medal hopefuls for 2012 #005: Nathan Robertson Britain's Olympic silver medallist from 2004 is building a new partnership with Jenny Wallwork"In the mixed doubles Jenny [Wallwork] and I got into the world's top 10 earlier this year and will be top seeds at the Commonwealth Games. We've been doing some team bonding at Center Parcs and, if we perform to our best, it should be good enough."We're an improving pair who only got together in 2008 so, if we can keep stepping up a level in every competition, then we're capable of challenging the top pairs in the world. Once you get into the top 10 you play the best more frequently."When I play in the men's doubles with Anthony Clark, we're both 33 and have the experience and the quality and our main concern is to stay injury free. With Jenny, the challenge is very different – she's 23 and improving all the time. I had a lot of success with Gail [Emms] and when she retired [after the 2008 Olympics] I took on a new challenge with a young player who isn't at the same level. My job is to use my experience to build her up so we can become as good a partnership."China are by far the dominant nation in badminton and have huge numbers of players. But it isn't impossible to win an Olympic medal; we've shown that in the past [with silver in 2004]. We can't compete with them overall but can certainly nip in and get a medal. It is about continuing to improve and performing when it matters."Key statisticsMixed doubles major honours (all with Gail Emms)Olympic silver 2004, world champion and Commonwealth Games gold 2006Olympic recordAthens 2004 silver; Beijing 2008 QF2009 world rank34th (with Wallwork)2010 world rank11th (with Wallwork)World rankings 1 Widanto/Natsir2 Gunawan/Marissa3 Mateusiak/Zieba4 Laybourn/Rytter Juhl5 Jiaming/YawenMain rivals for 2012 Too early to tell. Any of the world's top 10. Even the world No1 pair lost in the last eight at last month's world championshipBiographyBorn 30 May 1977 in NottinghamEducated Dayncourt comprehensive; full‑time badminton player since age of 16Favourite film Scarface or AnchormanFavourite book Andre Agassi's autobiography, Open. He was one of my sporting heroes growing up and learning the back story behind what you saw out on court was the best thing about the bookFavourite band I don't have one, I'm more into R&BOutside badminton I ... play golf and spend time with my 12-year-old daughter; and I'm into online scrabbleWhat would you have done if badminton hadn't worked out? It would have had to be something else within sport. Become a Formula One driver?Training"We don't have an off- and on‑season – it's a 12-month period where we work towards major events. We'll have a training block of eight to 12 weeks beforehand, split into three sections where we start with heavy weights, then strength building and by the time we're close to the event it's about speed. We also do long, hard sessions on the court."Olympic countdown26-31 Oct 2010Super Series – Denmark Open Odense, Denmark2-7 Nov 2010Super Series – French Open Paris, France18-23 Jan 2011Super Series – Malaysia Open KL, Malaysia8-13 Mar 2011All England Premier Super Series 2011 Birmingham, England22-29 May 2011Sudirman Cup Qing Dao, China21-26 Jun 2011Super Series – Indonesia Open Jakarta, Indonesia8-14 Aug 2011World Championship London, EnglandJan 2012 onwardsSchedule still to be confirmedIn numbers2 Medals Great Britain has won in Olympic competition since badminton's entrance in 19928 Badminton medals China won at Beijing 2008 – more than the next three nations in the table combined206 Official badminton smash world record, in miles per hour, recorded by doubles player Fu Haifeng in 2005Center Parcs is the official partner of Badminton England. Visit www.centerparcs.co.ukBadmintonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
NFL Experience to draw 250,000 The NFL Experience, an 850,000-square-foot pre-Super Bowl theme park, is projected to bring an estimated 250,000 people into North Texas — more than double the attendance of the Super Bowl, said Frank Supovitz, NFL senior vice president of events. feeds.bizjournals.com |
Richard Williams: Cycling is the sport where losers win Drugs are again said to be pervasive in cycling, but the numbers who struggle and fail would suggest that is not the caseThe announcement of Alberto Contador's positive test for clenbuterol is the worst news to hit cycling since Floyd Landis's disgrace four years ago – even more damaging, since the sport has been redoubling its efforts to eradicate cheating. But nothing is more harmful than when a lot of people are suddenly saying, "They're all at it, aren't they? Including those guys Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish?"It was no help last week when the head of the Italian Olympic committee's legal commission on anti-doping, a 78-year-old magistrate called Ettore Torri, chucked a grenade into the room. "All the riders are taking drugs," he announced. "If it wasn't harmful to their health, maybe it would be better just to legalise it."Inside Italy the storm of denial was immediate and predictable. But so much mud has been thrown at cycling in recent years that few, even among those who admired Contador's three Tour de France victories in the past four years, following a recovery from radical brain surgery in 2004, are inclined to swallow his protestations. Many who listened to his story about a friend arriving at the Tour with a piece of "good meat", which he ate the night before giving the sample, wished that he had said nothing at all, at least in public.It was inevitable that the minds of those who follow cycling would go back to the Operación Puerto investigation of 2006, in which Spanish police looked into the affairs of Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, a former medical consultant with various teams. Among the 100 bags of blood found in Fuentes's clinic, and believed to belong to athletes involved in doping, was one marked with the initials "AC".Contador had been a member of the ONCE and Liberty Seguros teams, with whom Fuentes had worked. Several leading riders were suspended as a result of Operación Puerto, but Contador was cleared. In 2007 he won his first Tour in the jersey of Discovery Channel, Lance Armstrong's team, and the following year he switched to Astana, the Kazakh-funded squad which had risen from the ashes of Liberty Seguros and whose riders were barred from the 2008 Tour because of doping infringements by several of them during the previous season.His second and third Tours were won in Astana's colours, but immediately after this year's success he announced his intention to join Saxo-Bank, a team owned and managed by Bjarne Riis, the Dane whose victory in the 1996 Tour is marked by an asterisk following his admission in 2007 that he had used EPO. If Contador has been trying to distance himself from doping and dopers, he has not been doing a very good job.So why is one prepared to defend the reputations of Wiggins and Cavendish? There is a simple answer to this: because they lose.Wiggins finished a remarkable fourth in the 2009 Tour de France, thanks to a dogged performance in the mountains made possible by a severe training programme. No one had been expecting such a performance, and there were mutterings of suspicion, particularly in France. This year, however, with the amply-funded new Team Sky squarely behind him, Wiggins disappointed. It was true that the 2010 course, with its sharper climbs, did not suit him so well, but had he been systematically doping he would still surely have finished higher than 24th.Cavendish's story is a little different. After an unscheduled bout of serious dental surgery had destroyed his pre-season training schedule, the Manx sprinter came back to win five stages of the Tour de France and the green jersey in the Vuelta a España. But then came two events that also mean a lot to him: the world championship in Melbourne, which he failed to finish, and Sunday's Commonwealth Games road race in Delhi, where he proudly represented the Isle of Man but traipsed in a well-beaten seventh. A rider with a sophisticated doping programme, or even a crude one, would be unlikely to have failed so badly.In this particularly area of sport, claims of innocence can be made to look stupid very quickly. But it's still worth saying: in cycling, by their defeats ye shall know them.Blanc twists and Payet gives Romania stickAfter the trauma of the World Cup, France may be on their way back – at least to judge by two late goals against Romania on Saturday night with which they avoided a goalless draw that would surely have led to another departure from the Stade de France amid a hail of whistling. In the closing stages Laurent Blanc made a flurry of changes, and they paid off. Two of his substitutes, Loïc Rémy and Yoann Gourcuff, scored the goals, in the 80th and 93rd minutes, but it was the contribution of the third, Dimitri Payet, that caught the eye. A 23-year-old Réunion-born forward who plays for St-Etienne, Payet marked his debut with a couple of fast, direct runs, the second of which created the opening for Gourcuff's strike. He looked a hot property.Secretariat movie would strike a chord with GayeMarvin Gaye once compared himself to Secretariat, the great stallion who won the US Triple Crown in 1973. If a fine horse throws riders and has trouble getting into the starting gate, Gaye told me a couple of years before his death in 1984, who cares as long as it wins the race? "I'm nervous and highly strung," he added. "Apparently it goes with my talent."A Hollywood film telling Secretariat's story has just opened in the US, depicting a special relationship between the stallion and his owner, Peggy Chenery. The lady herself, who is now in her late 80s, downplays it. "We had a mutual respect," she told the New York Times, "but he didn't stand still long enough for me to look in his eye and say a prayer." Which is probably what Berry Gordy Jr, the founder of Motown Records, would have said about Gaye, his brilliant, headstrong protege.Note to self: mind what you say about McClarenLook, I never said I thought Steve McClaren should be the next manager of England, OK? I just pointed out that his recent achievements abroad would, if maintained, undoubtedly place him among the most plausible English candidates to succeed Fabio Capello. So then Sir Trevor Brooking is asked whether the FA would entertain the idea, and Brooking doesn't say no, and the next thing that happens is that McClaren is letting it be known that he would not even consider the idea. Memo to self: be more careful the next time you open your mouth.CyclingDrugs in sportAlberto ContadorRichard Williamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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