Word: sport
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...seemed particularly prescient. Although Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin won the 12th consecutive pairs gold for Russia (or, previously, the Soviet Union), the Chinese nabbed the silver (Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao), bronze (Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo) and fourth place (Pang Qing and Tong Jian)?all in a sport China first entered little more than two decades ago. And China's emerging dominance of pairs skating is about to receive a powerful boost: the Russian pair will not be skating in the world championships in Calgary next month because they plan to go pro, leaving the door open...
...Russia, by contrast, is struggling to keep its Olympic luster. After the Soviet Union fell, sports funding dried up. With no income to support them, some athletes found refuge in the crime world. Others, who might normally have passed on their knowledge to the next generation, simply left the country, with top coaches Tatiana Tarasova and Tamara Moskvina both settling in America. Russia went from 23 medals at the 1994 Lillehammer Games to 13 at Salt Lake City in 2002. After Russia's uninspired showing at the last Winter Games, President Vladimir Putin lamented the country's parlous medical state...
...system relies on private money to bankroll athletes once taken care of by the state. Big Russian businesses like Lukoil and Sberbank have coughed up at least $300,000 each as sport sponsors. Eminent coaches like Tarasova and Moskvina returned from overseas to a Russia where some parents were now willing to pay lavishly for private lessons. Even the Russian Olympic Committee stepped in, offering a $50,000 reward to gold medallists. In figure skating, at least, this commercially driven program is churning out champions. Three nights after the Russian pair claimed gold, Siberian native Evgeny Plushenko, whose childhood rink...
...more patriotic front. "The skating spirit of the pairs teams will inspire other Chinese athletes to train harder for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing," predicted Wang Yitao, secretary general of the Chinese delegation in Torino. Wang surely must be pleased: Back in 1995, China's State General Administration of Sport published an "Olympic Glory Winning Plan" that included figure skating, short-track speedskating and speedskating. By the end of the first week in Torino, China had captured medals in all three sports. The offspring of the dragons were off to a fiery start...
...reopened the Cristallo for business, they commissioned a painstaking renovation and added a heated indoor swimming pool, indoor and outdoor Jacuzzis, a sauna and a hammam as well as the hotel's Transvital Swiss Beauty Center, which offers treatments like chocolate-therapy massage and herbal wraps, and an Isokinetic Sport Reconditioning Center, equipped to accommodate injured or training athletes. The guest rooms' decor of oak flooring, pine wainscoting and silk plaid curtains doesn't challenge, but that's the point: visitors are here to unwind...