Cycling world champ Valverde aims for delayed Tokyo Games
MADRID: Former road cycling world champion Alejandro Valverde revealed on Wednesday that he wants to take part in next year’s postponed 2020 Olympics despite turning 41 in 2021.
Valverde, who will celebrate his 40th birthday next month, announced in February that he would be retiring at the end of the 2021 season, making the yet-to-be-rescheduled Tokyo Games one of his last chances for a major honour.
“If the Games finally take place in the summer of 2021, if everything goes well and I’m still in good shape, I will go, even if I’ll be 41 and everything will obviously be more complicated,” Valverde said in a video published by his team Movistar on Twitter.
“If the selectors pick me, I’ll go there to give my best.” The 2009 Vuelta a Espana winner has never won an Olympic medal despite participating three times, in 2004, 2008 and 2012.
He is currently in isolation at his home in Spain, one of the countries worst-hit by the COVID-19 outbreak.
On Wednesday Spain joined Italy in seeing its number of deaths overtake China, with fatalities surging to 3,434.
cycling is on hold until at least the end of April as the world grapples with a virus that has take the lives of over 20,000 people and left more than three billion living under lockdown.
Meanwhile, a Canadian court has dismissed a lawsuit against the World Anti-doping Agency ( WADA) by three Russian cyclists who claimed damages after being banned from the 2016 Rio Olympics.
WADA on Wednesday announced the ruling, which was made last month by the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario following motions heard last May in Toronto, saying the appeal period had expired.
The trio also sued Canadian professor Richard Mclaren, whose report unveiled a broad Russian doping scheme and manipulation of testing results.
The court ruled that the issues fell under the jurisdiction of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland and that filing the claim in Canada was an abuse of process.
“To allow this action to proceed would undermine the Olympic Movement and, in particular, the dispute resolution provisions found in the Olympic charter,” Justice MD Faieta said.
WADA director general Olivier Niggli welcomed the decision, calling it “an important ruling that upholds CAS decisions, which are accepted and supported by the entire sports movement.”
“I am pleased that this case is over,” said Mclaren, a law professor at Western University in Ontario.
“Our investigation was thorough, professional and our findings were beyond question.”