Category — Russia

Haha. We like it when our favorite athletes get surly like our favorite cantankerous aunt.

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?

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Like the Olympic predictions we’ve been featuring here, we will soon find out in August whether Boris Gryzlov is correct or not.

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.

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Whoo. This is juicy news. But disturbing too. Who would think of drugging Olympic gold medalist Pasha Gishuk with GHB, “a predatory drug that can be mixed with alcohol to reduce resistance from a victim before a sexual assault?” Could it be the butler? The waiter? The candlestick maker? Whoever s/he was, we hope that the police is running after his or her ass.

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.

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Ahh, our first Olympic-related love story. We don’t blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for shopping in the young girls section, but Alina Kabaeva what are you thinking?

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.]

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Who will emerge as the overall champion in the Beijing Olympics? According to Luciano Barra, the United States will retain its title while China will land in second place.

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.

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