UFC
Ronda Rousey knocked out by Holly Holm in UFC championship fight
Neil Frankland
MELBOURNE, Australia ― The Associated Press
Published Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015 8:54AM EST
Ronda Rousey was the UFC’s unstoppable force until Holly Holm used the former champion’s aggression against her to produce one of the sport’s biggest upsets.
Rousey chased Holm around the ring at UFC 193 on Sunday – looking for the right hold and taking head shots along the way – until Holm saw an opening 59 seconds into the second round and snapped a kick to the head that immediately dropped her more fancied opponent to the canvas.
IN PHOTOS=Ronda Rousey no longer undefeated after being knocked out by Holly Holm in UFC title fight in Melbourne, Australia
Holm (10-0) jumped on the prone Rousey, delivering several blows to her head before the referee intervened, ending Rousey’s 12-fight unbeaten run and handing Holm the bantamweight title.
An ecstatic Holm jumped around the ring while Rousey stayed on the canvas as she received medical treatment amid the roar of a stunned, record UFC crowd.
“She’s won a lot of fights and imposed her will on a lot of fighters,” Holm said. “So I expected her to be aggressive and impose her will on me.
“She had me on the cage for a minute and obviously she was trying in for a take down right there ... she had a lot of things she was trying so I’m just glad I put in the practice,” she added.
Rousey, a former judo Olympian, was unbeaten through 12 UFC fights before meeting Holm, and a win would have been her seventh title defence. Instead, Holm, a 34-year-old veteran female boxer from Albuquerque, New Mexico, has the championship belt.
“We figured her aggression was coming, if it didn’t that’s OK, but with footwork and my career we figured she wouldn’t give me that space,” Holm said. “There’s been a lot of blood, sweat and tears but it was all worth it.”
Rousey left the stadium to receive treatment for concussion and facial cuts at a nearby hospital after the loss and skipped the post-fight media conference.
“She was transported (to hospital) because she got knocked out,” UFC chief Dana White said. “Obviously she’s completely bummed out and depressed.”
White said a rematch between Holm and Rousey made “a lot of sense” and would put other potential matchups on the backburner.
“Obviously we don’t make fights the night of the fight, but the rematch makes a lot of sense,” he said. “The rematch is what the people want to see.”
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In the other title bout, a bloodied Joanna Jedrzejczyk outlasted Montreal’s Valerie Letourneau to successfully defend her straw-weight belt in a five-round slugfest.
Jedrzejczyk (11-0) won a unanimous points decision over Letourneau (8-4) who offered the champion one of her tougher fights in some time.
The six-time Muay Thai world champion Jedrzejczyk started to pressure her opponent from the second round with some trademark, lightning-quick combinations to Letourneau’s head, while forcing the challenger to keep her distance with some effective kicks.
Organizers announced a crowd of 56,214 at Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium, which normally hosts Australian rules football matches. The mark eclipsed the 55,724 fans who attended UFC 129 at Toronto’s Rogers Centre in 2011.
Rousey, 28, has taken UFC by storm since her debut in 2012 and her success has led to several movie projects as well the publishing of her autobiography.
But it was Holm’s calm confidence and the manner of her win that attracted all the attention Sunday.
“Tonight was one of those moments,” White said. “These are the moments in fighting that make it so crazy and so fun. Tonight was one of those moments.”
Holm, a former undisputed welterweight boxing champion, said the moment of her UFC title victory was “one of those moments that you live for.”
“They’re the scariest moments. This fight was a lot for me mentally,” she added. “I couldn’t tell you how many times I cried in the gym leading up to this fight.
“It’s a lot to take in, but those kinds of fights are the ones where a loss is devastating but a win is that sweet of a victory.”
White said that while most onlookers were shocked by Rousey’s loss, he was not one of them.
“At the end of the day I made this fight. I said this was a good fight,” he said. “Holly was the right fight. Ronda had never faced anybody who uses the range and distance the way she does.
“This woman has four times more fights than Ronda does. She’s been a world champion,” he said.
In other fights on the undercard, Mark Hunt of New Zealand (11-10-1) won his rematch with Brazil’s Antonio Silva (19-8) by technical knockout after the referee stopped the feature heavyweight bout in the first round.
New Zealand-born Australian middleweight Robert Whittaker (16-4) earned a gutsy win on points over Uriah Hall (13-6), while Jared Rosholt (14-2) won a unanimous decision of towering Dutchman Stefan Struve (30-8) in a scrappy opening heavyweight bout of the main card.
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Russia stripped of Beijing 2008 4x400m women's silver medal
Fri Aug 19, 2016 9:52pm BST Reuters
Members of Russia's women's 4 x 400 relay team pose with their silver medals during the medal ceremony of the athletics competition in the National Stadium at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 23, 2008. The members of the team are Yulia Gushchina, Liudmila Litvinova,... REUTERS/Mike Blake (CHINA)
By Karolos Grohmann | RIO DE JANEIRO
Russia have been stripped of the 4x400m women's relay silver medal from the Beijing Olympics after Anastasia Kapachinskaya tested positive for a steroid in a re-test of her sample, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said on Friday.
"Re-analysis of Kapachinskaya’s samples from Beijing 2008 resulted in a positive test for the prohibited substances stanozolol and dehydrochlormethyltestosterone (turinabol)," the IOC said.
Jamaica were third and Belarus finished in fourth place in the Beijing race.
"The IAAF (international athletics federation) is requested to modify the results of the above-mentioned events accordingly and to consider any further action within its own competence," the IOC said.
Kapachinskaya was also disqualified from her 400m run where she had placed fifth.
Her Russian team mates Alexander Pogorelov, who was fourth in the decathlon, and shotputter Ivan Yushkov also had their Beijing Games results canceled out after testing positive for the same substance.
Yushkov was 10th in his event eight years ago.
Earlier this week Russia were ordered to return their gold medals from the 4x100m women's relay from the same Games after Yulia Chermoshanskaya also tested positive in a re-test.
The IOC stores samples for a decade to test with newer methods or for new substances. The ruling body conducted targeted re-tests before the Rio Olympics.
A total of 98 samples were positive in reanalysis of samples from both the Beijing Games and the 2012 London Olympics as the IOC attempted to root out cheats and stop them from going to the Rio Games.
Russia's track and field team, with the exception of one athlete based in the United States, were banned from the Rio Games over what the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said was a state-backed doping program.
Japan
'It's exhilarating': Japan's female sumo wrestlers take on sexism
Amateur wrestlers hope ban on women in the professional arena will one day be overturned
Justin McCurry in Gifu Mon 18 Jun 2018 20.04 EDT Last modified on Mon 18 Jun 2018 23.51 EDT
Eight of the current nine members of the Asahi University women sumo team pose for a group photo by the Dohyo Photograph: Laura Liverani for the Guardian
It isn’t hard to see why Chisaki Okumura is one of Japan’s best female sumo wrestlers. Combining her considerable height and heft with flashes of speed, her practice bouts end with a succession of opponents thrown to the ground or shoved unceremoniously out of the ring.
On a humid, wet afternoon in central Japan, Okumura draws on her reserves of strength for a final, punishing series of drills with a male opponent. By the end, it is hard to tell who is more exhausted.
For more than two hours every weekday afternoon, the 17 men and nine women of Asahi University’s sumo club stretch, warm up and perform drills together, although for safety reasons they conduct full-on bouts separately.
Training is centered on two dohyo – a dirt-covered 4.55m diameter circle marked out with half-buried rice-straw bales - which are among the few places where female sumo wrestlers are defying the centuries-old sport’s uneasy relationship with gender.
Pic=A female and a male member of the Asahi University sumo team practice against each other during their daily training. Photograph: Laura Liverani for the
As amateurs, the women athletes at Asahi and other universities are not bound by the ancient traditions governing professional sumo - in which only men can compete. But that might not be the case for much longer.
Many hope the ban on women joining the professional sumo ranks will one day be overturned, proving that deep-seated misogyny has no place in a sport striving to be accepted as an Olympic event.
In April, not long after professional sumo was rocked again by allegations of bullying and violence, an incident at an exhibition tournament in Maizuru, near Kyoto, triggered a new campaign to rid Japan’s de facto national sport of its sexist traditions.
The row was triggered by after several women, including at least one nurse, rushed on to the ring to administer first aid to the local mayor, who had collapsed after suffering a stroke. Using the public address system, the referee repeatedly ordered them to leave the ring, but the women refused.
Officials sprinkled “purifying” salt on the wrestling surface after they had left. Sumo officials later denied that this had been done because of the women’s presence in the ring. Salt is customarily scattered on the ring before bouts and after a wrestler has been injured.
The impromptu first responders had fallen foul of an ancient rule banning women from entering, or even touching, the dohyo.
The rule has prevented local female politicians from presenting awards inside the ring.
The Maizuru incident not only embarrassed sumo but was also seen as a metaphor for the treatment of women in Japan, which performs poorly in global tables of gender equality and female political representation.
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Tomoko Nakagawa, the mayor of Takarazuka in western Japan, has unsuccessfully petitioned the Japan sumo association to lift the ban. “I can’t understand why it is only the sumo world that refuses to change or is even going backwards,” she told Agence France-Presse.
The sport’s struggle with sexism is equally baffling to Okumura, who has been wrestling since she was at middle school.
“Sumo shouldn’t be thought of as a sport for men and women, it’s for everyone,” says Okumura, runner-up in last month’s international women’s sumo invitational championships in the 64-80kg category.
“I definitely benefit from being able to train with the men, and I don’t get the impression that they’re looking down on me and the other women. If I were allowed to compete against them in a proper bout I think I could hold my own.”
The Asahi club was formed eight years ago and is now one of about half a dozen women’s sumo clubs at Japanese universities. The female members use the same number of kimarite – or winning moves – as the men, but wear their mawashi belts over shorts and T-shirts.
“There are some people who still struggle to accept the idea of women’s sumo, but I’ve never thought it was at all unusual,” says Shigeto Takahashi, the club’s manager, who has been coaching female wrestlers for 35 years. “The only real difference is that the women have to be a little more careful about injuring their shoulders, but they’re not allowed to wear any padding.”
Kaori Matsui, an associate professor in the university’s department of health and sports sciences, and the club’s deputy manager, said it was natural for women to compete in sumo, having already broken down barriers in other contact sports such as wrestling and judo.
Pic=Two members of the Asahi University women sumo team go through their routine training, practicing Shiko, or foot stomping. Photograph: Laura Liverani
The number of new women taking up amateur sumo is static, however, a problem she blames on the dearth of female coaches to offer guidance to girls and young women.
“Some people I meet are amazed that there is even an international women’s sumo scene,” she says. “There needs to be a more coordinated approach to promoting the brilliance of women’s sumo. When you watch it close up, it’s exhilarating.”
While weary wrestlers gulp down cups of cold tea from a copper kettle, Minayo Nishimoto shows few signs of fatigue - unsurprising, perhaps, for a woman who has been hurling her comparatively slight frame around sumo rings since she was nine years old.
“I understand that the dohyo is regarded as sacred, but whichever way you look at it, the ban on women is sexist,” says Nishimoto, who prides herself on her uwatenage overarm throw. “But that just makes me all the more determined to carry on and be the best female wrestler in Japan.”
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