Showing posts with label olympics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label olympics. Show all posts

Thursday, February 25, 2010

(CNN) -- Things were good for Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette in the weeks before the Winter Olympics. She had a 2009 world silver medal. Training was going well. And, she told her agent, she had her confidante and source of strength by her side.

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"'I have my mom,'" agent Dave Baden recalled Rochette saying to him at the time. "'At this point, I know what to do, and I have my mother.'"
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"She's been training for this all her life, so the only thing she needed to get to that next level was the strength she got from her mother," Baden said.
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That strength, he said, is helping her pull through the Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, even though her mother is now gone.
Therese Rochette died Sunday of a heart attack in Vancouver at age 55, Canadian Olympic officials said. Joannie Rochette opted to stay in the games, and two days later stirred a crowd with a courageous performance that earned the third best score in the women's short program.
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On Thursday, the 24-year-old will finish her drive for her first Olympic medal during the free skate program at Pacific Coliseum.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics Friday.The news was announced by Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, at a meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark.With help from hometown heroes like the Obamas, the Windy City was aggressively lobbying to host the games. The upside to the rejection is that Chicago possibly saved money, as making the Olympics profitable would not have been an easy win.Chicago was competing with Tokyo, Madrid, Spain and Rio de Janeiro in wooing the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen. The IOC also rejected Tokyo Friday, but Madrid and Rio are still in the running.Chicago 2016, the organization leading the effort to host the games, had projected a cost of $3.8 billion, including a "rainy day" fund of $450 million in case of unforeseen increases if the city won the bid.But there was good reason to be skeptical of that projection, said Robert Livingstone, producer of GamesBids.com and a leading expert in the Olympic selection process. Host cities routinely overrun their Olympic budgets, he said."It's going to be more expensive than we think it's going to be, because it typically is," Livingstone said, before the decision was made Friday. "I think every [host] city is going to lose money. It's not an efficient event.The bidding process alone cost Chicago about $100 million, Livingstone estimated.A Chicago 2016 spokesman, who asked not be named, had stood by the $3.8 billion projection. "Our numbers are completely feasible thanks to the infrastructure already in place, the number of venues already built and the temporary nature of the majority of those we're planning to build," he wrote, in an e-mail prior to the IOC rejection.

 

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