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Italy

If You're An Olympian Busted For Doping, This Is What To Do

RAI, LA REPUBBLICA (Italy)

Worldcrunch

It has become an Olympic tradition for an athlete or two or three to test positive for banned substances during or after the Games. Also traditional are the subsequent heartfelt denials, stone-faced defiance and/or mysterious disappearance of said suspected performance-enhanced athlete.

This year, however, we have a new response: The Weeping Confession.

Italy’s Alex Schwazer, the 2008 Olympic race walk gold medalist who was booted from the London Games on Monday after testing positive for blood bosster EPO, first agreed to a face-to-face interview on Italian national television RAI Uno.

He gets particularly choked up when referring to his girlfriend – Italian figure skating champion Carolina Kostner – to whom he lied about a mysterious box of “vitamins” he was keeping in their refrigerator.

Later, he held a press conference in the northern Italian city of Bolzano, where there was more shame – and more tears.

Still, some doubts remain about how complete the confession really was. Schwazer said he bought the banned substances on his own, traveling alone to Turkey after researching it on the Internet. He also says he never had used banned substances before last month, and was clean when he blew away the field in Beijing in the 50-kilometer walk in Olympic-record time.

In any case, on the human side, Schwazer said between sobs that he was quitting sports and hoping to “begin a normal life.”

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Heavy Shelling On Dnipro & Kyiv, 10 Downing St. Attack, “Slavery Simulator”

The Met Police arrested a man after a car crashed into Downing Street gates on Thursday. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was in Downing Street at the time, but the incident is not being treated as terror-related.

Yannick Champion-Osselin, Sophie Jacquier & Chloé Touchard

👋 নমস্কার*

Welcome to Friday, where Ukraine’s Kyiv and Dnipro were targeted by dozens of Russian strikes overnight, an investigation is ongoing after a car crashed into the residence of the UK prime minister, and Google removes a very racist game from its app store. Meanwhile, Guadalupe Rivero in Argentine daily Clarín writes about the release of a new edition of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, tailored for people with cognitive difficulties.

[*Nômôskar - Bengali]

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