Valeryiy’s gold is the fourth for Russia, a sleeping giant which has yet to flex its muscles in Beijing. To their credit, Russia’s wrestlers are fully awake as they won the first three gold medals for good old Mother Russia.

Photo source: beijing2008

Yelena won the Laureaus Award for Sportsmanship in 2007 and, in the words of wikipedia, “makes fun of the fact that female pole vaulters are seen as sex symbols for male couch potatoes”. Hehe. Male couch potatoes, you can learn more about our Olympic hottie by visiting her website.

More hotties:
Hottie Pellegrini Wins Fourth Gold Medal for Italy
Olympic Hottie of the Day: Leryn Franco
Olympic Hotties: Amanda Beard Naked
Olympic Hottie of the Day: Goldie Sayers
Olympic Hottie of the Day: Juliana Felisberta Silva
Olympic Hottie: Yelena Isinbayeva
Olympic Hottie: Maria Sharapova

PHOTO SOURCE: Yelena Isinbayeva’s Official Website

She failed a drug test according to the IAAF and has been banned for two years. She will miss the Beijing Olympics and her results from the past two years have been wiped off the record books.

PHOTO SOURCE: AFP

I train twice a day, six days per week. With this I need 8 to 9 hours of sleep each night and one-and-a-half hours of sleep in the afternoon. On Wednesday or Thursday I usually have one practice, and instead of the second one I go to a banya, and on Sunday I have banya too.

Eight to nine hours of sleep? You’re luckier than me, Yuriy. But then, with all that running you’re doing, you do need more hours of sleep to recover physically. By the way for those of you who don’t know, a banya is a Russian sauna.

What other things does Yuriy do apart from training and visiting banyas?

I like to cook and used to cook tasty food, but my wife does not let me now. She says that it is the women’s job to cook, and everyone must do their job, and she does all cooking at home.

Aww. Come on Irina, give Yuriy some space in the kitchen. “Chef Yuriy” sounds good, you know. Anyways, how does Yuriy view the Olympics and his competition in Beijing?

The Olympic Games is a competition in which any athlete can win quite unexpectedly. And this is so because it takes place once in four years and it is hard to prepare from a psychological view point.

Even distinguished athletes, such as Wilson Kipketer for example, the World record holder, the strongest athlete in the world in the 800m, was second in Sydney in 2000, though he could easily win. He was the strongest, in my opinion, in Athens but psychologically he was not ready. He wanted to win there very much and started his finishing kick too early. That is why, I think, he lost. This was his tactical mistake.

I do not know exactly who will come to Beijing. But judging by the winter season results the main candidates for getting into the Olympic final are Wilfred Bungei, Mbulaeni Mulaudzi, the Athens silver medallist, Yusuf Saad Kamel, and Abubaker Kaki Khamis, the Valencia gold medallist. He is young, only 18, but has got quite high result and good chances to get on the Olympic podium. But anything can happen.

Anything can happen indeed. But we here at the Olympian blog will be watching you Yuriy and the rest of the 800 meter runners. Best wishes to you all.

Oops, by the way, Yuriy Borzakovskiy is from Russia.

The 27-year-old Russian bettered the time of 3:35.47 set by Australian Nathan Deakes on Dec. 2, 2006 in Geelong, Australia.

“It becomes a good tradition for me to set records before the Olympics,” said Nizhegorodov, who won the silver medal in the 50 km walk at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

“I broke the world record in May 2004, a couple of months before the Games in Athens, but unfortunately that record wasn’t ratified. I hope it’ll be different this time round.”

PHOTO SOURCE: olympic.org

Sharapova, the most popular tennis star (yeah she’s more popular than Roger Federer), is criticizing the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) for forcing her to do a four hour commercial shoot a day before a tennis tournament. She’s also asking her fans to vote on what she should do.
Here’s the statement published in her website:

I want all my fans to know that the WTA Tour is forcing me and several of the other top players to do a 4 hour commercial shoot for WTA Tour marketing materials. They want me to do this shoot on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday of the Rome tournament after flying 12 hours from LA.

I have set my own personal rules when is comes to doing shoots and I never do shoots before tournaments because they are mentally draining and I want to just focus on my tennis. Now the WTA is telling me if I don’t do this shoot they will fine me over $300,000. As you can see the WTA Tour loves to fine players.

To be honest, I would love to do this and help promote the tour as much as possible, but to force me to do this shoot the day before a tier 1 tournament is just not right. I am interested in what my fans think I should do?

So Sharapova fans out there, we know there are legions of you, what should Maria do? Help her decide by voting in her poll.

Sharapova along with Svetlana Kuznetsova and two other players yet to be named will be raising the banner for Russian tennis in the Beijing Olympics.

PHOTO SOURCE: Tennisplanet.com

Xinhua: Russian athletes may win 30 to 40 gold medals at the Beijing Olympic Games, Boris Gryzlov, speaker of the State Duma, lower house of the parliament, said on Wednesday.

Olympic games has become the “indicator by which one can judge the quality of a country’s sport development, and the effectiveness of the money used in this field,” Gryzov was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying.

He said that Russia had spent more than 12 billion roubles “on the training of our athletes for participation in the Beijing games,” and have chances to rank among the world’s three best sport states.

Russian lawmakers are closely watching the training of domestic athletes, as well as the legislative support of sport development.

“Among the initiative discussed in the lower house at present are the drawing and adoption of new laws on sport training, and life insurance and health of members of Russian national teams,” the speaker said.

Russia will send a 900-member delegation to the Beijing Olympic Games in August, including 470 athletes, a senior official of the Russian Olympic Committee said last Tuesday.

Associated Press: Former Olympic ice dancer Pasha Grishuk was drugged with GHB, a common date rape drug, during a business meeting at a ritzy Orange County hotel, a sheriff’s spokesman said Tuesday.

Grishuk, who won Olympic gold medals for Russia in ice dancing in 1994 and 1998, was attending a business meeting at the St. Regis Monarch Beach on April 12 when she began to feel ill and numb, sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino said.

While eating dinner, she spotted a partially dissolved pill in the bottom of her drink. Investigators later found another dissolved pill in the bottom of a drink she ordered in the hotel’s lounge.

Amormino says toxicology tests that came back Tuesday were positive for GHB, but it wasn’t immediately clear how the pills got in Grishuk’s drinks or who put them there.

“How somebody was able to do that, I honestly don’t know, but it appears that somebody, for whatever reason, attempted to drug her,” he said.

GHB, or gamma hydroxy butyrate, can cause breathing problems, loss of consciousness, seizures, drowsiness, coma and death.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration labels GHB a “predatory drug” that can be mixed with alcohol to reduce resistance from a victim before a sexual assault. It is also popular with teenagers at raves and is sometimes used by bodybuilders for its anabolic effects, the DEA said.

The 36-year-old Grishuk is a Ukrainian native who now lives in Los Angeles.

An e-mail to Grishuk was not immediately returned. A spokeswoman at the St. Regis did not immediately return a call for comment.

According to reports (a.k.a. rumors), which the Russian President pooh-poohed, the two are planning to tie the knot sometime in June after the lovestruck Vlad (he looks smitten in this photo, di ba?) steps down from office.

It’s not clear whether the President divorced his wife (some reports say he did, others say he did not) and the President criticized those who are speculating about his love life. We guess we are included in his target, although we deny having a snotty nose, when he said this:

“I have always had a negative opinion of those who, with their snotty noses and their erotic fantasies, meddle in other people’s lives.”

Aww, come on Vlad. For a former KGB official who spied on peoples lives, you shouldn’t be too sensitive about us “meddlers”; at least we are not putting recording devices in your bedroom. And what’s that bit about erotic fantasies? We think all people are guilty of having some but we don’t think they fantasize about you. [In fairness to Vlad, maybe that erotic fantasies bit is just a bad translation from Russian.]

By the way, why are we blogging about this? Ahh, we almost forgot to mention that Alina Kabaeva won a gold medal (for the individual all around rhythmic gymnastics) during the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.

Here’s the Russian President congratulating her for her victory.

And here’s Alina performing one of her routines. We have to agree with the news reports which describe her as “stretchy”.

And here’s Alina kind of winking at us. No wonder, Vlad was smitten.
Edited to add: Oops, we’re wrong to say that this is our first Olympic-related love story. The distinction actually goes to our post on Singapore’s Li Jiawei and Ronald Susilo, the ex-lover’s who’s recent spat may cost Singapore an Olympic medal in Beijing.

Read more at the following sites:
New York Post (from which the above photos were sourced)
Telegraph.co.uk
Metro.co.uk

His projection, issued last December 2007, is as follows:

1. United States: 98 medals (47 gold)
2. China: 89 medals (38 gold)
3. Russia: 88 medals (32 gold)

Barra, an Olympic official from Italy, earlier predicted that China will top the gold medal race (China, 45; U.S., 41; and Russia, 34) but he revised his projection and came up with the one above.

Anyways, how did this Barra guy arrive at his numbers? It’s no rocket science, my friend, what he did pala is to look at the results in the most recent world championships. If there’s no world championships for a particular sport, he looked at the equivalent event for that sport.

That’s it? And to think that we thought he did some complicated statistical thing to come up with his projection. Apparently not. But we actually like his method. Sometimes, simple ways are better than complicated ways, no?

We still kind of think that China will emerge as the overall champ but we will know soon enough whether Barra got it right.

Buongiorno, friends in Italy!

P.S. Read the article about Barra’s projection here.