Russians claim curler caught in doping scheme

After confirming that both of Alexander Krushelnitsky’s doping samples tested positive for the heart drug meldonium, the officials in charge of the Russian team at the Pyeongchang Olympics sought to blame just about anyone other than the curler himself.

Krushelnitsky won bronze with his wife in mixed doubles, but he now is likely to be stripped of the medal.

The Russians, who are competing at the Pyeongchang Games as neutral athletes and under the Olympic flag because of a vast doping scheme at the 2014 Sochi Games, said Tuesday they want to open a criminal investigation to find out who could have caused this positive result.

“(The Russian Olympic Committee) has initiated a comprehensive investigation of the circumstances which also includes the criminal investigation under the (Russian federation) criminal law to establish the facts of the case in detail,” the Olympic delegation said in a statement.

The statement did not say exactly what crime had been committed, but Russian Curling Federation senior vice president Andrei Sozin told The Associated Press he believed U.S. security services had somehow “put something” into Krushelnitsky’s water or tampered with his drugtest sample. He didn’t speculate on how that could have happened.

Before coming to South Korea for the Olympics, the Russian curlers trained in Japan.

Together no more

They cheered. They cried. They hugged. They watched as fans by the thousands shouted, “We are one.” Unification flags for the two Koreas, longtime rivals and sometimes bitter enemies, flapped across the Olympic arena.

And now they go back home, quite possibly never to see each other again.

The Korean women’s hockey team, which included players from both North and South, ended its historic Olympic run on Tuesday with a fifth straight loss but a host of unforgettable feel-good sparks.

Team Korea was defeated by Sweden, 6-1, in a seventh-place match in the Pyeongchang Games on Tuesday, a healthy crowd again on hand to cheer them on.

The team lost by a combined score of 28-2 in its games and was rarely competitive. Yet the repeated defeats were, for many, insignificant. Instead, this notion dominated discussion: the significance of the Koreas’ first-ever joint Olympic squad taking the ice smack in the middle of an abrupt, now ongoing reconciliation between the rival Koreas.

“They are an amazing group,” said the team’s Canadian coach, Sarah Murray, who wept while hugging some of her squad.

“I could have never imagined our players being this competitive in the Olympics,” Murray said after the game. “So when I was standing there I was just so proud of them, just watching them skate around and salute the fans.”

Feel good moment

Nigeria was winning the Olympic women’s bobsled race.

Yes, really.

That sentence is 100 percent accurate albeit with some massive reservations. The Nigerians were the second sled down the track in the opening heat of the women’s competition at the Pyeongchang Olympics, and over the first few turns of the course they actually were going along faster than the Korean sled that preceded them.

So yes, they were winning.

Of course, after that quick flirtation with the lead, their sled bounced off the roof and commenced the inevitable freefall to last place.

Briefly leading, finishing last, none of that was the point Tuesday night. Simply getting to the Olympics has been victory enough for this Nigerian team, three women who live in the U.S. and have backgrounds in other sports before deciding to try sliding and now, officially, are the first bobsled to represent Africa on the sport’s biggest stage.

“There were some good things,” pilot Seun Adigun said. “One of the biggest things that we’re trying to do from the beginning is show people how important that it is to be selfless and what it means to also do something bigger than yourself. And I think that that right there has been the objective and what people have been able to receive from our time here at the Olympics.”