Hubertus Von Hohenlohe, who has been called the world's most interesting Olympian, is making his presence felt in PyeongChang despite not being on the snow.

The six-time Olympian designed a race suit for Mexico inspired by Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, a holiday celebrated throughout the country.

Russians No Longer Dispute Olympic Doping Operation

The officials ended their long denial, but insisted the state had no role in the doping and it was not responsible for the institutionalized cheating.

www.nytimes.com|Rebecca R. Ruiz

Over several days of interviews here with The New York Times, the Russian officials said they no longer disputed a damning set of facts that detailed a doping program with few, if any, historical precedents.

“It was an institutional conspiracy,” Anna Antseliovich, the acting director general of Russia’s national antidoping agency, said of years’ worth of cheating schemes.

A lab director tampered with urine samples at the Olympics and provided cocktails of performance-enhancing drugs, corrupting some of the world’s most prestigious competitions. Members of the Federal Security Service, a successor to the K.G.B., broke into sample bottles holding urine. And a deputy sports minister for years ordered cover-ups of top athletes’ use of banned substances.

1. Grenada
2. Bahamas
3. New Zealand
4. Jamaica
5. Slovenia
6. Bahrain
7. Denmark
8. Hungary
9. Fiji
10. Lithuania

As you scan the Olympic medal tally, one thing stands out: larger countries tend to win more medals. An obvious exception, especially in 2008, is Australia, who won the fifth largest number of medals with a population of 23 million, 52nd largest of Olympic countries.

The obvious next question is: who leads the world in medals per capita? This site, which is updated daily during the Olympics, provides the answer.

In addition, it calculates the leaders in gold medals per capita, as well as a weighted medal count where gold is worth four points, silver two and bronze one (weighting as suggested by the New York Times.) Finally, it's a little unfair to ignore the relative wealth of countries, so the site counts medals relative to GDP (provided by the World Bank.)

My bias? I'm originally from New Zealand, which has consistently been in the top half-dozen or so countries for total medals and gold medals per capita, and in 1984 won the most golds per capita.

Others have thought about this, of course. Here are some links to other discussions:

• BBC4 More or Less
• Chuck Culpepper of the Los Angeles Times

Craig Nevill-Manning

• Andre must run in a replica pair of Jesse’s shoes
• Andre has to run on a dirt track as Jesse did in 1936

Steve meets young Canadian sprinting sensation Andre De Grasse, and learns of his meteoric rise from high school track star to a contender for world’s fastest man. Andre is accustomed to sprinting the 100 metres in high tech shoes on a high tech track.  But for this Equalizer challenge he runs 100 metres in the competitive conditions of the legendary Jesse Owens. A shoemaker recreates the leather shoes that Jesse Owens wore at the 1936 Olympics. A track is found that matches a 1930s era dirt and cinder running surface.  In practice sprints Andre thinks the old shoes are great but the old track doesn’t have the same bounce as a modern one. Running beside a virtual avatar of Jesse Owens, Andre sprints a hundred meters in Jesse’s shoes. Who wins?

Russia state-sponsored doping across majority of Olympic sports, claims report

Russia operated state-sponsored doping for four years across the "vast majority" of summer and winter Olympic sports, says a new report.

www.bbc.com

Dr Richard McLaren: “the system was set up following the 2010 Winter Olympics, and was in place until 2014. It allowed the transformation of a positive result to a negative one, overseen by the Deputy Minister of Sport. The Ministry of Sport, Rusada and the FSB were involved in this process”.

An investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) says Russia's sports ministry "directed, controlled and oversaw" manipulation of urine samples provided by its athletes.

It says Russian athletes benefited from what the report called the "Disappearing Positive Methodology", whereby positive doping samples would go missing.

Grigory Rodchenkov claimed he doped dozens of athletes before the 2014 Winter Olympics, which were held in Sochi, Russia.

Rodchenkov - described by the Kremlin as a "scandalous" former official - also alleged he had been helped by the Russian secret service, the FSB.

He claimed they had worked out how to open and reseal supposedly tamper-proof bottles that were used for storing urine samples so the contents could be replaced with "clean" urine.

McLaren sent a random amount of stored samples from "protected Russian athletes" at Sochi 2014 to an anti-doping laboratory in London to see if they had scratch marks around the necks of the bottles that would indicate they had been manipulated.

McLaren said "100% of the bottles had been scratched" but added that would "not have been visible to the untrained eye".

The claims

• Russia decided to cheat following the "very abysmal" medal count of 15 at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics
• It began making positive drug tests disappear from its anti-doping laboratories in late 2011
• Before the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia created a storage bank of clean, frozen urine
• Russia's security service, the FSB, worked in a building next to the Sochi laboratory, swapping positive urine samples for clean negative ones through a "mouse hole", adding table salt to make them weigh the same
• A key FSB agent had access to the Sochi anti-doping laboratory, disguised as a sewage and plumbing contractor
• But, in swapping urine samples, the FSB agents left miniscule tool marks on the bottles - later found by McLaren's investigators using a microscope
• The Moscow laboratory destroyed 8,000 samples it held dated prior to 10 September 2014

Tsukiji: So long, and thanks for all the fish

ON JANUARY 5th, in a pre-dawn ritual going back decades, a handbell rang to mark the year’s first auction at Tsukiji, Tokyo’s sprawling fish market.

www.economist.com

1. The Tokyo 2020 Olympics will cost £9.98bn SIX TIMES more than the original estimate
2. Rio has a budget of £2.38bn
3. London 2012 cost £8.77bn
4. Sochi, Russia, cost £31bn ($51bn)

The head of Toyota Motor Corp., Akio Toyoda, stepped down Monday as vice president of the organizing committee for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as organizers acknowledged the cost of hosting the games will be far higher than originally thought. 

Squeezed between the Sumida river and the Ginza shopping district, Tsukiji is creaking at the seams. Some 60,000 people work under its leaky roof, and hundreds of forklifts, carrying everything from sea urchins to whale meat, careen across bumpy floors. The site’s owner, the city government, wants it moved.

That is unpopular. Traders resent being yanked to a sterile new site to the south. The new market is being built on a wharf whose soil is contaminated by the toxic effluent from a former gasworks. The clean-up and negotiations delayed the move for over a decade.

The final blow was Tokyo’s successful bid to host the 2020 Olympics. A new traffic artery will cut through Tsukiji, transporting visitors to the games’ venues. Part of the site will become a temporary press centre, says Yutaka Maeyasui, the executive in charge of shifting the market. Our time is up, he says, glancing around his decrepit office. The site has become too small, old and crowded. An earthquake could bring the roof down.

...

“You won’t find anyone here who supports the relocation,” says Chieko Oyoshi, who runs the tuna business her grandfather founded. ... The move will kill whatever trade is left, she laments.

www.boston.com

A combination of pictures taken during the London 2012 Olympic Games shows athletes' fingernails decorated with their national colors. From top left : USA's Allison Schmitt, Hungary's Suzana Jacobos, Britain's Rebecca Adlington, Mexico's Luz Mercedes Acosta Valdez, Britain's Alison Williamson, USA's Venus Williams, Britain's Alison Williamson, France's Margaux Farrell, Lithuania's Ruta Meilutyte. (AFP/GettyImages)