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Yao looks for healing touch
Yao Ming is opting for a traditional approach to realise his dreams. The injured Houston Rockets star is consulting traditional medicine practitioners in China so that he can return to the national squad for the Olympics. Yao is out of action after suffering a stress fracture in his left foot and is facing a race against time to get fit before the Games.
Never too old for a big fight
It might be the year of comebacks for mums but a Japanese boxer is venturing into the top league at 45. Kazumi Izaki, a mother of two, became Japan’s oldest pro boxer after passing the board’s licence test. Izaki, who has daughters, aged 21 and 14, laced up her first pair of boxing gloves in 2001. “I’m a mum but I’m going to give it everything I’ve got,” said the former aerobics instructor.
Illegal vodka ring smashed
The Winter Olympics may still be a long way off, but it has already made its presence felt. Russian authorities confiscated 14,000 bottles of vodka that used the Olympic name without permission. “It’s the first such case involving vodka production in the run-up to the winter Olympics to be held in Sochi in 2014,” said a spokesman for the Krasnodar prosecutors. The vodka bore the Olympic symbol of five interlocking rings and the words ‘Sochi 2014’.
Mineiro fans raise the roof
Cash-strapped Atletico Mineiro, one of Brazil’s most popular clubs, celebrated their centenary with a special mass in which the priest blessed the club’s shirt and held aloft a rooster. Festivities in Belo Horizonte, Atletico’s home city, began at midnight with around 3,000 fans closing off the road in front of the club’s headquarters to dance and sing. Fireworks were let off in various parts of the city, accompanied by a cacophony of car horns. In the morning, hundreds of people, including former players, gathered at the city’s cathedral for a special mass.
Maradona’s peace offering
Diego Maradona has sent out a note of apology with a difference. The Argentina football legend sent a signed shirt to Italian tennis player Potito Starace to apologise for heckling him during a Davis Cup quarter-final match against David Nalbandian in Buenos Aires. Starace threatened to “bash a racquet” in Maradona’s teeth after the former Napoli striker insulted him from the crowd. Napoli fan Starace, who used to idolise Maradona, later received an autographed shirt from the 1986 World Cup winner as a peace offering.
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