IOC seeks more information regarding vote-buying case

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LIMA, Peru (AP) — What was supposed to be a stress-free meeting of the International Olympic Committee turned into something quite different Monday, when IOC president Thomas Bach was forced to spend nearly an hour defending the handling of a mushrooming bid scandal and insisting the IOC is doing its best to fight corruption.

Bach was on defense throughout a news conference held after a meeting of the IOC executive board, which earlier in the day said it was asking Brazilian authorities for details involving IOC member Carlos Nuzman. Nuzman, the organizer of the Rio Games, is accused of funneling $2 million to another former IOC member, Lamine Diack, to secure votes to bring the Olympics to Rio.

Last week, Brazilian police brought Nuzman in for questioning, setting up the awkwardness this week in Peru, where the IOC will award the 2024 Olympics to Paris and the 2028 Games to Los Angeles on Wednesday.

“We have taken action in the case of Mr. Diack,” Bach said, in reference to the former head of track and field whose IOC membership has been stripped. “When evidence is provided (in the Nuzman case), we will act. But in order to take action, you need evidence.”

Less than two years ago, Bach was critical of FIFA, which was embroiled in a bidding scandal of its own. He urged soccer’s governing body to get its house in order because it could “continue to overshadow the credibility of FIFA and affect all sports organizations for such a long time.”

At that time, Bach started reforming the IOC’s own auditing and ethics operations, and on Monday, he insisted those changes are well under way. But he couldn’t avoid questions about how he could be critical of others when the IOC clearly still has its own issues, some two decades after reforms in the wake of a bid scandal that sullied the Salt Lake City Games.

“Nobody wants to have credibility issues,” Bach said. “But we have to be realistic. No organization in the world is immune to credibility issues. We have to face this reality and we have undertaken the reforms and provided ourselves with the instruments to tackle these challenges. I hope these will also be respected.”

Also in the news this week was IOC member Patrick Hickey’s resignation from the executive board, a year after being arrested in Brazil in a ticket-scalping investigation. And not attending this week’s meetings is IOC member Frankie Fredericks, who was previously removed from the committee’s inspection team for Paris and Los Angeles in wake of allegations he was caught up in the vote scandal. Fredericks has denied wrongdoing, saying a $300,000 payment he received from Diack’s son on the day Rio won the vote for 2016 was for legitimate consultancy work.

Bach also parried questions about doping. The IOC is still awaiting conclusions from a pair of committees before determining the fate of Russian athletes for next year’s Winter Games. The committees are studying evidence from the McLaren report, which documented widespread doping fraud inside the country at the Sochi Games and beforehand.

Both committees are submitting interim reports this week “and it will be up to them to define the right time to submit the final report,” Bach said. He’s hoping for more clarity before the World Cup ski season begins later this year.

And yet, the IOC’s handling of the doping issue was a mere subplot to the issue of whether the organization’s bidding process is irreversibly broken.

Because neither 2024 nor 2028 will be subject to a competitive vote, Bach likely has avoided that issue for the time being. He called getting Paris and Los Angeles on the Olympic calendar a “golden opportunity” that the IOC simply couldn’t pass up. And yet, that led to questions about whether the change in strategy was nothing more than a quick fix to remove the voting power from the 94 IOC members’ hands.

No, he said. “Just today, we adopted even stricter rules for 2026,” Bach said of the only remaining Olympics left to be awarded this decade.

But all the questions Monday circled back to one simple theme: Does the IOC have an image problem?

“This is not my call to speak of the IOC’s image, because it’s in the eyes of everybody,” Bach said. “Everybody should make their own judgment. The only hope I have is that the judgment is made on facts and actions, and not so much by perceptions.”

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MORE: Police raid house of Brazil Olympic Committee president

Jessica Pegula upset in French Open third round

Jessica Pegula French Open
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Jessica Pegula, the highest-ranked American man or woman, was upset in the third round of the French Open.

Elise Mertens, the 28th seed from Belgium, bounced the third seed Pegula 6-1, 6-3 to reach the round of 16. Pegula, a 29-year-old at a career-high ranking, had lost in the quarterfinals of four of the previous five majors.

Down 4-3 in the second set, Pegula squandered three break points in a 14-minute game. Mertens then broke Pegula to close it out.

Pegula’s exit leaves No. 6 seed Coco Gauff, last year’s runner-up, as the last seeded hope to become the first U.S. woman to win a major title since Sofia Kenin at the 2020 Australian Open. The 11-major span without an American champ is the longest for U.S. women since Monica Seles won the 1996 Australian Open.

FRENCH OPEN DRAWS: Women | Men | Broadcast Schedule

Mertens, who lost in the third or fourth round of the last six French Opens, plays a Russian Anastasia in the fourth round: Pavlyuchenkova or Potapova.

Earlier, ninth-seeded Russian Daria Kasatkina became the first player to reach the fourth round. She won 6-0, 6-1 over 69th-ranked American Peyton Stearns, the 2022 NCAA champion from Texas.

Sloane Stephens, the 2017 U.S. Open champion, is the lone American woman left in the bottom half of the draw. She plays Kazakh Yulia Putintseva later Friday. Gauff, Bernarda Pera and Kayla Day remain in the top half.

Friday’s featured men’s matches: Top seed Carlos Alcaraz versus 26th seed Denis Shapovalov of Canada, and No. 3 Novak Djokovic against No. 29 Alejandro Davidovich Fokina of Spain.

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Olympians, Paralympians get early look at Paris on ‘Top Chef’ World All-Stars

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A year from now, they hope to vie for medals in the City of Light. But on this day, four U.S. hopefuls for the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics competed on “Top Chef” World All-Stars at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, the first cross-promotional moment across NBC Universal’s One Platform for the Games.

As Parisians and tourists traversed the Champ de Mars, Olympic champions gymnast Suni Lee and sprinter Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Paralympic champion swimmer Mallory Weggemann and medalist sprinter Hunter Woodhall bundled and huddled and did everything possible to stay warm between rain showers.

Then came the 30-minute frenzy. Each athlete was paired with a cheftestant for what the Bravo series calls a wall challenge: the chef and the athlete each attempted to make the same dish while separated by a divider, unable to see what the other was doing. The duo whose dishes have the closest appearance and taste win.

It’s little surprise that Weggemann prevailed. At 33 on the day of filming, she’s a decade older than the rest of the athletes.

When she was 18, Weggemann lost movement from the waist down while receiving epidural injections to treat shingles. Four years later, she swam at her first Paralympics and won her first gold medal.

“I understand that when I go onto a [filming] set like today, and I’m rolling rather than stepping, that looks different,” she said. “Not everyone who’s going to watch ‘Top Chef’ is a sports fanatic, and so they maybe don’t watch the Olympics and Paralympics, but in that moment, we got to bring them into the movement in a way that we maybe otherwise wouldn’t. I’m not oblivious to the fact that as a woman with a disability in that moment, I also have the power to change perceptions because not everyone in our society has exposure to disability.”

Each of the athletes, flown in by Delta, the official airline of Team USA through the 2028 Los Angeles Games, came at a different point in their journeys.

Weggemann has already been to three Paralympics and earned five medals. She did the “Top Chef” competition while three months pregnant. Baby Charlotte arrived March 16. Her goal is to be on the podium in Paris and be able to see her husband and daughter in the stands.

Woodhall, who won three medals in Tokyo in his Paralympic debut, visited the French capital with his then-fiancée Tara Davis, who placed sixth in the Tokyo Olympic long jump. Their Texas wedding was a month after the “Top Chef” filming.

“In Tokyo, we weren’t able to be there for each other,” said Woodhall, referring to COVID-19 travel restrictions for those Games not allowing spectators. “Paris is so exciting because we’ll both be able to really be in the moment and support each other through both the Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

McLaughlin-Levrone had husband Andre Levrone Jr., a former NFL practice squad wide receiver, by her side in Paris. Before “Top Chef,” she had a whirlwind spring and summer, getting married in May and then twice breaking her world record in the 400m hurdles. At the top of her sport, McLaughlin-Levrone had a decision to make in the fall and winter offseason: continue in the hurdles, where she has accomplished everything, or venture into another event, the 400m without hurdles, to test herself.

“That world record has stood for so long, and no one’s come even close to it,” she said of the flat 400m, and its 37-year-old world record, while in Paris. “So we definitely want to be able to try that and see what we can do there as well.”

Now, McLaughlin-Levrone is set to return to Paris next week for her first outdoor race since August. It will be a flat 400m. She also plans to race the 400m at the USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships in July, and possibly at August’s world championships in lieu of the hurdles.

Top Chef World All-Stars
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and cheftestant Sara Bradley meet after preparing their dishes during the “Top Chef” wall challenge. (Fred Jagueneau/Bravo)

The gymnast Lee became one of the unexpected golden stories of the Tokyo Games. After Simone Biles withdrew from the meet, the Hmong American from Minnesota seized the all-around title, the biggest prize in her sport.

She hasn’t performed in international gymnastics since. Lee matriculated at Auburn and competed for the Tigers. But NCAA gymnastics involves different routines, competitions and scoring than Olympic gymnastics. It’s such a contrast that, traditionally, joining a college team has often meant retirement from the Olympic level.

The afternoon before the “Top Chef” filming, Lee walked inside the Accor Arena in the Bercy neighborhood, the site of the 2024 Olympic gymnastics events. A competition was taking place that included the Brazilian who took silver behind Lee in Tokyo.

“I am a little nervous to get back out on the bigger stage,” Lee said then. “Going to that meet actually was really important to me because I think I needed the help of re-motivating myself and seeing what I’m getting back into, watching the competition, just getting used to that atmosphere again.”

Two months after that experience, Lee announced she would leave Auburn after her sophomore year to return to elite training for a 2024 Paris Olympic bid.

The “Top Chef” integration helps launch summer Paris Games-related fanfare, including national and world championships in many Olympic and Paralympic sports and events to mark the one-year-out dates from the Opening Ceremonies (July 26 for the Olympics, Aug. 28 for the Paralympics).

“Top Chef,” in its 20th season, previously featured Olympians before the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games and then again before Tokyo. Host Padma Lakshmi noticed a common trait.

“Their attention to detail is extraordinary,” she said. “Having that Olympic training, and really listening to what your coaches want, and what the parameters of the contest is, is something that they’re skilled at doing day in and day out.”

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