Women's U18 team saves face for U.S. hockey; more Olympic notes

In a year in which Canada dominated the U.S. on the ice, the women's under-18 team destroyed the Canadians 5-2 in the IIHF women's U18 championship game.

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After a year in which Canadian hockey teams have dominated those from the U.S. in international play, it took the women's under-18 team to save some sort of face for the U.S.'s on-ice fortunes. Hannah Brandt of Vadnais Heights, Minn. paced the Yanks with four points and her team outshot the Canadians, 30-16, as the U.S. women captured the IIHF women's U18 championship in Stockholm with a 5-2 win against Canada in the gold medal game.

The Americans swept all five games they played in the tournament, outscoring the opposition, 47-4, to win their third gold medal in four years. Alex Carpenter of North Reading, Mass., who led the tournament with ten points, received honors as the tournament's top forward and Milica McMillen of St. Paul, Minn. was voted top defenseman. Many players from both teams will likely go on to represent their national teams at senior world championships and Olympics.

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Ilke Wyludda, the Olympic champion in the discus throw at the Atlanta Games, had most of her right leg amputated this week after an infection ran through it and proved to be resistant to treatment. The 41-year-old, who competed for East Germany, suffered a bacterial infection last month and subsequently sustained blood poisoning as the infection spread. Doctors told her the condition threatened her life and left her no choice beyond amputation.

The German dominated her event for roughly a five-year window, winning 41 consecutive competitions between 1989 and 1991. She was beaten in 1991 by Tzvetanka Khristova of Bulgaria at the world championships and gained a reputation as someone who would underperform at major meets. Though often entering worlds as the favorite, she finished second twice and fourth once, but never first. Wyludda recorded a personal-best throw of 74.56 meters in the discus in 1989 and was also a national team member in the shot put, tossing the shot 20.23 meters in 1988.

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Ah, family squabbles. Last weekend, Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the maligned international governing body for soccer, claimed the IOC handles its finances "like a housewife," adding, "She receives some money and she spends some money." Blatter, who was attending the Asian Cup in Doha at the time, went on to point out that of the 115 members on the IOC, only 45 have an actual sporting background.

"If you need to know where in the world you still have princes, princesses and kings," he said, "then you go to the list of members of the IOC. You will find a lot of them."

The IOC responded to the comments, with a letter to The Associated Press, which read in part, "It is worth noting that more than 90 percent of the income received by the IOC is redistributed to the organizing committees of Olympic Games, the international federations and the national Olympic committees."

The IOC had recently opened an inquiry, directed to its ethics commission, into allegations of financial impropriety by Cameroon's Issa Hayatou, an IOC member and vice president of FIFA.

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U.S. television networks are eagerly awaiting word this week from IOC headquarters in Lausanne where Richard Carrion, the committee's point man in charge of securing television rights fees from the States, is pondering the idea of awarding the Games rights for the next four Olympics instead of the next two as has been previously discussed. NBC has the rights to the 2012 Games in London, but with ESPN and Fox in on the bidding, and CBS showing tempered interest, the IOC may consider a longer contract that allows a new network to establish itself as a face of the Olympics, as NBC has done in the past, and ABC did before them. NBC's intentions are unclear, given its recent takeover by cable company Comcast. Carrion has said that he believes the package could bring in as much as $4 billion, though that may be an optimistic number, given a still-recovering economy and the fact that not one of those Games will be held in the United States.

The 2016 Olympics in Rio would provide a favorable time zone for a U.S. network, but the 2014 Games in Sochi will not. The three cities bidding for the Winter Games in 2018 (Pyongchang, Korea; Annecy, France; and Munich, Germany) are not in a favorable time zone either, and none of the likely bidders for the Summer Games in 2020 are expected to come from the Americas region.

The actual auction for the two or four-Games package is expected to take place sometime this spring.

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The U.S. is turning eastward to bolster its synchronized swimming prospects next season. USA Synchro hired Mayu Fujiki, a former member of the bronze-medal winning Japanese squad at the 1996 Atlanta Games, to be the team's head coach of the 2011 Pan-Am and world teams. Fujiki has coached in several countries since her retirement and recently led the Spanish national team to a surprising victory at the FINA world trophy meet last month in Moscow against Russia, the defending Olympic champions. The U.S. team placed fifth at the Beijing Games in the team event and has just one bronze medal to show for its last three trips to the Olympics in team competition.