QINWEN ZHENG VS. JESSICA BOUZAS | ATHENS 2026 | ROUND 1

 

BARBORA KREJCIKOVA VS. MARIA SAKKARI | ATHENS 2026 | FINAL

 

ALYSIA PARKS VS. MARIA SAKKAR

 

BARBOA KREJCIKOVA VS. QINWEN ZHENG | QUARTERFINAL | ATHENS 2026

 

UKRAINIAN TAEKWONDO ATHLETES WON 5 MEDALS AT THE EUROPEAN CADET CHAMPIONSHIP IN GREECE

Ukrainian cadets won 5 awards, including a gold, a silver, and bronze medals, at the European Taekwondo Championship in Athens. Over 500 athletes from 35 countries participated in the competition.

At the competition in Greece, with the participation of athletes from 35 countries, Ukrainian cadets won gold, silver, and bronze medals, UNN reports with reference to the press service of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine and the national Olympic team of Ukraine.

Details

Ukrainian taekwondo athletes won 5 awards at the European Cadet Championship, which took place in Athens (Greece).

More than 500 athletes from 35 countries, including 18 Ukrainians, took part in the taekwondo (WTF) competition. According to the results of the competition, the "blue and yellow" team climbed the podium five times:

Gold medal: Andrienko Mariia (weight category up to 33 kg);

Silver and bronze: Naboka Prokhor (weight category up to 57 kg); Pevchuk Tetiana (weight category up to 41 kg); Dovzhanin Karyna (weight category up to 47 kg); Nasadchuk Nikita (weight category up to 61 kg).

Recall

Taekwondo athlete Artem Harbar won the third gold medal for Ukraine at the World Summer Universiade - 2025.

Ukrainian taekwondo athlete Maksym Manenkov won a gold medal at the World Summer Universiade in Germany in the weight category up to 58 kg. This victory was the seventh medal for Ukraine at the competition, and Manenkov admitted that he was inspired by Oleksandr Usyk's victorious fight.

- UNN

ATHENS 2025 | FINAL

ATHENS 2025 | SEMI-FINALS

 

ATHENS 2025 | DAY 5

 

ATHENS 2025 | DAY 4

 

ATHENS 2025 | DAY 2

 

BRADLEY WIGGINS: TOUR DE FRANCE WINNER ADMITS TO COCAINE ADDICTION, WHO IS HIS EX-WIFE CATH, CHILDREN

Sir Bradley Wiggins has revealed he became addicted to cocaine in the years following his retirement from professional cycling.

In an interview with The Observer, the 45-year-old former Tour de France winner and five-time Olympic champion spoke openly about his drug use, which he says nearly killed him.

“There were times my son thought I was going to be found dead in the morning,” Wiggins said. “I was a functioning addict. People wouldn't realise – I was high most of the time for many years.”

Wiggins retired from cycling in 2016 after a storied career that saw him win Olympic golds across the Athens, Beijing, London, and Rio Games, as well as becoming the first Briton to win the Tour de France in 2012. But after his retirement, he spiralled into depression, addiction, and financial ruin.

“I realised I had a huge problem. I had to stop. I'm lucky to be here,” he said. “I already had a lot of self-hatred, but I was amplifying it. It was a form of self-harm and self-sabotage. It was not the person I wanted to be. I realised I was hurting a lot of people around me.”

An Audience with Sir Bradley Wiggins, Sunday February 16. Sir Bradley Marc Wiggins, is a British former professional road and track racing cyclist, who competed professionally between 2001 and 2016 and he is coming to Halifax to share tales of his illustrious career.

“There's no middle ground for me. I can't just have a glass of wine – if I have a glass of wine, then I'm buying drugs. My proclivity to addiction was easing the pain that I lived with.”

Wiggins, who says he has now been clean for a year, also credited disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong for helping him through recovery. Armstrong, stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping, has been offering to pay for Wiggins’ therapy. “He’d worried about me for a long time,” Wiggins said, adding that Armstrong also speaks regularly with his son, Ben. “He speaks to Ben a lot about me.”

Despite becoming Britain’s most decorated Olympian, being knighted in 2013, and earning a reported £13 million during his career, Wiggins’ personal life has been marked by deep trauma, family breakdown, and more recently, bankruptcy.

Who is Bradley Wiggins’ ex-wife?

In June 2024, Wiggins was declared bankrupt, and earlier this year admitted he had nowhere to live. His marriage to Cath Wiggins, his long-time partner and mother of his two children, had broken down, and a subsequent relationship also ended.

Sir Bradley Wiggins looks on before the start of Stage Four of the 2014 Tour of Britain. (Photo by Dan Mullan/Getty Images) | Getty Images

Does Bradley Wiggins have children?

The couple share two children: Ben, 19, a promising cyclist crowned junior world champion in the Madison, and Isabella, 18. Despite Wiggins’ public scandals and personal struggles, both children and his ex-wife have been by his side.

“There were some really extreme moments,” Wiggins said on The High Performance Podcast. “Probably the last one was about a year ago… I was in a very dark place in a very dark room for many days… it was a hotel, and my son actually was the one who kind of intervened and made me realise, recognise the self-destructive mode I was in.”

Cath said previously: “I've no doubt whatsoever in his integrity as an athlete, none whatsoever. Nor did the children. They never once doubted their dad.”

Wiggins has spoken openly in recent years about being sexually abused as a teenager by his coach at the Archer Road Club, Stan Knight, who is now deceased.

He was also raised largely without his father, Gary Wiggins, an alcoholic and abusive former cyclist who walked out when Bradley was just 18 months old. Though the two reconciled briefly in adulthood, Gary was later found dead under suspicious circumstances in Australia in 2008.

- Rahmah Ghazali

ECA CHAIRMAN & PSG PRESIDENT NASSER AL- KHELAIFI WITH YOUNG AFRICANS PRESIDENT ENG. HERSI SAID IN ATHENS

 

CELEBRATIONS IN GREECE AS OLYMPIAKOS BEAT FIORENTIINA 1-0 FOR FIRST EUROPEAN TITLE

AP Photo 

 ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Setting off wild celebrations in Athens, Olympiakos won Greece’s first European club title by beating Fiorentina 1-0 with a goal in extra time of the Europa Conference League final on Wednesday.

Ayoub El Kaabi provided the dramatic ending, diving to nudge in a last-gasp goal in the second period of extra time, with fans erupting in celebration after a lengthy wait for a VAR check for offside.

“Praise be to God, we promised our supporters we’d do this today and we did it,” El Kaabi said.

The Morocco striker – who finished as the competition’s top scorer – struck in the 116th minute of the match and dropped to his knees as he waited to see if the goal would stand after he had met a cross from Santiago Hezze.

AP Photo 

The goal decided a game that had looked destined for a penalty shootout following an energetic but largely risk-free encounter at AEK Arena, and condemned Fiorentina and its coach Vincenzo Italiano to a second straight defeat in the final of the Europa Conference League after losing last year to West Ham.

“We created chances and had the opportunity to lift the cup but unfortunately it didn't happy – I'm sorry,” Italiano said. “In Europe it’s not an easy thing to get this far and lose.”

Olympiakos coach Jose Luis Mendilibar secured a second straight European title after winning the Europa League with Sevilla last season.

“It’s an honor to have made all these people happy, I feel immense joy and happiness to have made people feel this way and I dedicate it to them,” Mendilibar said.

"We have achieved something that our club has never achieved before. We will celebrate it and celebrate it the way we should. Then we will start working on what comes next.” Tens of thousands of Olympiakos fans joined boisterous celebrations across the Greek capital after attending outdoor viewing parties. Youths held up lit flares in the port city of Piraeus, near Athens, where the team is based.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis described Olympiakos as “a true legend,” adding in an online post: “Olympiakos has won the Europa Conference League and made history! A sensational night for the club itself, but also for Greek football as a whole.”

AP Photo 

The third-tier European club competition took place amid a massive security operation, with some 5,000 police officers forming concentric cordons around a northern area of the capital – amid Europe-wide security concerns this summer for major sporting events including the Paris Olympics and European soccer championship in Germany.

The final was briefly marred by scuffles between Fiorentina fans inside the stadium and riot police next to them.

Although the visitors dominated the early stages of the final, Fiorentina goalkeeper Pietro Terracciano kept his team in the game with two impressive fingertip saves to block on-target shots from Daniel Podence in the fourth minute and Stevan Jovetic in the sixth minute of extra time.

El Kaabi, who scored a total of 11 goals in the competition, had been largely sidelined in the match by Fiorentina's unyielding four-man defense.

Olympiakos players celebrated with 15,000 fans after the game, some holding their young children as golden confetti was fired into the air around the awards podium.

“It’s the best emotion I’ve felt so far in my career,” defender Panagiotis Retsos said. "I’ve had a lot of ups-and-downs but I’m very, very happy to be here.” ___

Nicholas Paphitis and Michael Varaklas in Athens, Greece contributed.

- DEREK GATOPOULOS

DESPITE WEATHER GLITCH, THE PARIS OLYMPIC FLAME IS LIT AT THE GREEK CRADLE OF ANCIENT GAMES

AP Photo 

 ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece (AP) — Even without the help of Apollo, the flame that is to burn at the Paris Olympics was kindled Tuesday at the site of the ancient games in southern Greece.

Cloudy skies prevented the traditional lighting, when an actress dressed as an ancient Greek priestess uses the sun to ignite a silver torch — after offering up a symbolic prayer to Apollo, the ancient Greek sun god.

Instead, she used a backup flame that had been lit on the same spot Monday, during the final rehearsal.

Normally, the foremost of a group of priestesses in long, pleated dresses dips the fuel-filled torch into a parabolic mirror which focuses the sun's rays on it, and fire spurts forth.

But this time she didn't even try, going straight for the backup flame, kept in a copy of an ancient Greek pot. Ironically, a few minutes later the sun shone forth.

From the ancient stadium in Olympia, a relay of torchbearers will carry the flame more than 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) through Greece until the handover to Paris Games organizers in Athens on April 26.

AP Photo 

International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach said the flame lighting combined “a pilgrimage to our past in ancient Olympia, and an act of faith in our future.”

“In these difficult times ... with wars and conflicts on the rise, people are fed up with all the hate, the aggression and negative news,” he said. “We are longing for something which brings us together; something that is unifying; something that gives us hope.”

Thousands of spectators from all over the world packed Olympia for Tuesday's event amid the ruined temples and sports grounds where the ancient games were held from 776 B.C.-393 A.D.

The sprawling site, in a lush valley by the confluence of two rivers, is at its prettiest in the spring, teeming with pink-flowering Judas trees, small blue irises and the occasional red anemone.

Greek authorities maintained high security around Olympia on Tuesday, after protests by rights activists disrupted the lighting ceremonies for the Beijing summer and winter games. Armed police stopped incoming vehicles and checked for explosives, while sniffer dogs combed the grounds.

The first torchbearer was Greek rower Stefanos Douskos, a gold medalist in 2021 in Tokyo. He ran to a nearby monument that contains the heart of French Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the driving force behind the modern revival of the games.

The next runner was Laure Manaudou, a French swimmer who won three medals at Athens in 2004. She handed over to senior European Union official Margaritis Schinas, a Greek.

The IOC's Bach praised Paris organizers for doing “an outstanding job” with preparations for the July 26-August 11 games.

He also highlighted their environmental impact, saying that cleanup efforts will make it possible to swim in the River Seine, which traverses Paris, “for the first time in a hundred years.”

The flame will travel from Athens' port of Piraeus on the Belem, a French three-masted sailing ship built in 1896 — the year of the first modern games in Athens.

AP Photo 

According to Captain Aymeric Gibet, it's due on May 8 in the southern French port of Marseille, a city founded by Greek colonists some 2,600 years ago.

The Belem arrived in Katakolo, near Olympia, on Monday. Lookers-on included a small, enthusiastic group of tourists from the northwestern French region of Brittany, where the ship's homeport of Nantes is, waving French and Breton flags.

“We thought it would be a unique opportunity to see the flame lighting at the historic site of Olympia,” said Jean-Michel Pasquet from Lorient, near Nantes. “And when we also learnt the Belem would carry the flame ... we said we must do this.”

But Pasquet said he'd have to watch the Paris Games from home.

“For us, it would be really very expensive, unaffordable,” to go to the venues, he said. “So we'll watch them on television ... from our armchairs.”

- NICHOLAS PAPHITIS

UEFA SUPER CUP 2023