Latest Turin Stories
By Alan Crosby TURIN (Reuters) - Wayne Gretzky and Canada's hockey team arrived in Turin on Tuesday to defend their gold medal but questions over illegal gambling followed him across the Atlantic and threatened to overshadow their Olympic bid. Looking tired after a long overnight flight from Toronto, Gretzky arrived with his family in Turin along with the team he handpicked as executive director of Team Canada. With Gretzky was his wife, actress Janet Jones, who has been implicated in...
By Jon BramleyTURIN -- Zhang Dan is only 20 and probably knows nothing of the great acts of courage and defiance which have graced the Olympics Games over the past 110 years.But on Monday night she wrote her own piece of Games history which will never be forgotten by the thousands who witnessed it in the ice rink or the many millions who watched on television.The tiny, elfin-faced ice dancer had an outside chance of a gold when she and partner Zhang Hao took to the ice to round off a...
By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - NBC's first three days of Winter Olympics coverage, punctuated by news that the U.S. team's biggest name had dropped out, dominated Nielsen's prime-time ratings but posted predictably sharp declines from the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. Nielsen Media Research figures on Monday also showed that the first three days of NBC'S tape-delayed broadcasts from the Winter Games in Turin, Italy, fell short of ratings posted by the opening weekend of the 1998...
By Rachel Sanderson TURIN (Reuters) - One of the places to be at these Olympics is outside a luxury goods store in downtown Turin. Finding tickets too pricey and security too tight to get close to official venues, some locals crowd around two plasma screens in the shop's window broadcasting the 20th Winter Games. Elisabetta Rinaldi, an Italian flag painted on her cheek, was among dozens on Sunday evening standing outside the store, cheering for Canadian men's luge champion Jeff...
By Mark Ledsom SAN SICARIO (Reuters) - The Olympic opening ceremony was not even underway last Friday before the first decisions of the Turin Winter Games were being announced. These were not medals awarded on the rink, the track or the slope, however, but rather the first set of legal verdicts to be handed down by a locally convened division of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Founded by the International Olympic Committee in 1984 -- before being reformed into an independent...
By Nelson GravesTURIN -- Unassuming Barbara Salmoiraghi is in the front lines of a swat team that can make frenzied beer-guzzling men take their hats off."Marketing, marketing. Base calling," she barks into a walkie-talkie. "Section 114. Ten guys wearing Heineken hats!"The dark-haired Turin resident is part of the brand police keeping the Winter Olympics venues commercially pure.Sponsors such as Coca-Cola, Samsung and Visa spend millions to underpin the Games. But in one...
By Pritha Sarkar TURIN (Reuters) - Michelle Kwan's decade-long hunt for Olympic gold came to a tearful end on Sunday after the American pulled out of the Winter Olympics with a groin strain. One of the most successful skaters of all time, she owns a record-equaling nine U.S. national titles and five world crowns. Yet the woman who was barely more than a child when she captured the world title at 15, chasing the Olympic dream proved to be her downfall. In 1994, Kwan qualified for the...
By Pritha Sarkar TURIN (Reuters) - American Michelle Kwan pulled out of the Winter Olympics on Sunday after suffering a groin injury during practice. Kwan, a five-times world champion, sustained a groin strain on Saturday at the Palaghiaccio practice ice rink in Turin, the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) said. "Taking myself off the team is the most difficult decision I've ever had to make but it's the right decision," Kwan said in a statement. "This injury prevents me from skating my...
By Pritha Sarkar TURIN (Reuters) - Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin took their first step toward continuing Russia's domination of the Winter Olympic pairs title with a spectacular short program on Saturday. The twice world and five-times European champions established a 3.92 points advantage over China's Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao and are now primed to win Russia's 12th consecutive pairs title. Fellow Russians Maria Petrova and Alexei Tikhonov were lying in third place ahead of...
TURIN (Reuters) - Americans Rena Inoue and John Baldwin became the first pairs skaters to complete a throw triple Axel at the Winter Olympics on Saturday. Baldwin punched the air in delight the moment Inoue landed the jump cleanly in front of a roaring contingent of American supporters at the Palavela rink. "It felt fantastic, it worked out exactly how I pictured it," Inoue told reporters. Baldwin added: "If you ask me what we want to do in skating, we would say we want to leave our...
