Austrian Alpine skier Hannes Reichelt kept winning races after returning from several severe knee and back injuries that hampered his career.
The 2015 World champion’s latest setback, however, was one too many.
The 40-year-old Reichelt said Wednesday he will retire at this week’s World Cup Finals in Lenzerheide, Switzerland.
The announcement came six years after the Austrian won the biggest prize of his two-decade-long career — super-G gold at the world championships in Beaver Creek, Colorado.
“I’ve got the feeling that after 20 years on the World Cup the time has come to leave,” Reichelt said.
He failed to get back to the top level after damaging his right knee in a downhill crash in December 2019 and didn’t make the Austrian team for the worlds in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, last month.
“In races I was struggling more and more to get to the limit. To me it was clear: I race to the fullest or not at all,” Reichelt said.
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Reichelt did not qualify for this season’s World Cup Finals but was planning to ski down the super-G course on a farewell run as one of the forerunners ahead of Thursday’s race.
Reichelt has won 13 World Cup races, including the classic downhill in Kitzbühel, and had 44 podium results.
The Austrian won his home race in January 2014 while suffering from back pains. He could barely stand straight after finishing and needed surgery for a herniated disk the following day, ruling him out for the Sochi Olympics.
Another of his wins came in a super-G in 2005, only nine months after tearing an ACL.
Reichelt is also known for earning one the most unlikely discipline title wins in the 54-year history of the World Cup.
In 2008, he arrived at the Finals in Bormio, Italy, trailing leader Didier Cuche by 99 points in the super-G standings. Reichelt won the race to earn 100 points, and Cuche was ultimately bumped into 16th place by his Swiss teammate Daniel Albrecht — with only the top 15 earning World Cup points.
It would be the only crystal globe award for Reichelt, who also won super-G silver at the 2011 Worlds.
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Boxing could be dropped from the 2024 Paris Olympics due to governance issues within the sport.
The IOC said in a statement Thursday, first reported by the Washington Post, that recent International Boxing Association (IBA) decisions could lead to “the cancellation of boxing” for the 2024 Paris Games.
Some of the already reported governance issues led to the IOC stripping IBA — then known as AIBA — of its Olympic recognition in 2019. AIBA had suspended all 36 referees and judges used at the 2016 Rio Olympics pending an investigation into a possible judging scandal, one that found that some medal bouts were fixed by “complicit and compliant” referees and judges.
The IOC ran the Tokyo Olympic boxing competition.
Boxing was not included on the initial program for the 2028 Los Angeles Games announced last December, though it could still be added. The IBA must address concerns “around its governance, its financial transparency and sustainability and the integrity of its refereeing and judging processes,” IOC President Thomas Bach said then.
This past June, the IOC said IBA would not run qualifying competitions for the 2024 Paris Games.
In September, the IOC said it was “extremely concerned” about the Olympic future of boxing after an IBA extraordinary congress overwhelmingly backed Russian Umar Kremlev to remain as its president rather than hold an election.
Kremlev was re-elected in May after an opponent, Boris van der Vorst of the Netherlands, was barred from running against him. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled in June that van der Vorst should have been eligible to run against Kremlev, but the IBA group still decided not to hold a new election.
Two weeks ago, Kremlev defended the IBA at a forum in Abu Dhabi, saying it implemented most of the recommendations given to them by the IOC and that the IBA respected the IOC.
“I would also like to say to the International Olympic Committee that they can issue recommendations to us, but they have no right to dictate to us how to live,” Kremlev said, according to a translator, while seated between retired U.S. Olympic boxing medalists Evander Holyfield and Roy Jones Jr. “Not a single other organization should interfere or meddle in the business of our association.
“I would like to urge the International Olympic Committee to create a working party, and we will resolve everything quite quickly. There will be no problems.”
The IOC’s full statement Thursday read:
“The recent IBA Congress has shown once more that IBA has no real interest in the sport of boxing and the boxers, but is only interested in its own power. The decisions and discussions to keep boxers away from the Olympic qualifiers and the Olympic Games cannot be understood differently. It has also become clear again, that IBA wants to distract from its own grave governance issues by pointing to the past, which has been addressed by the IOC already in 2019. There is no will to understand the real issues, the contrary: the extension of the sponsorship contract with Gazprom as the sole main sponsor of IBA reinforces the concerns, which the IOC has expressed since 2019 over and over again. This announcement confirms that IBA will continue to depend on a company which is largely controlled by the Russian government. The concerns also include the recent handling of the CAS decision which did not lead a new Presidential election, but only a vote not to hold an election. The IOC will have to take all this into consideration when it takes further decisions, which may – after these latest developments – have to include the cancellation of boxing for the Olympic Games Paris 2024.”
The 2024 Olympic boxing qualifying period starts May 1
Boxing made its Olympic debut in 1904 and has been on the program continuously since 1920.
The Associated Press and NBC Olympic research contributed to this report.
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Lyu Xiaojun, a two-time Olympic champion weightlifter from China, tested positive for the banned blood booster EPO and has been provisionally suspended until the resolution of his case.
Lyu, a 38-year-old who took gold at the London and Tokyo Games and silver in Rio, tested positive from an Oct. 30 sample, according to the International Testing Agency. Lyu can request a backup B sample be tested.
Lyu took gold at seven of his 10 appearances between the Olympics and world championships from 2009 through 2021 competing at either 77kg or 81kg. He is the world’s most decorated weightlifter across all categories in that time span.
In the outlier years, he earned silver at the 2010 World Championships, was leading the 2015 Worlds after the snatch before failing on all three clean and jerk attempts and took silver at the 2016 Rio Games behind Kazakhstan’s Nijat Rahimov, who this past March had his gold medal stripped for urine swapping. The IOC has not reallocated medals from the 2016 Olympic event, but could still do so.
In Tokyo, he became the oldest Olympic weightlifting champion in history, according to Olympedia.org. American Harrison Maurus took fourth in the event that Lyu won, just missing becoming the first American man to win an Olympic weightlifting medal since 1984.
Lyu did not compete at worlds earlier this month, when countryman Li Dayin won the 81kg title.
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