China Wins 1st London Olympics Gold Medal

LONDON – The first athlete to qualify for the London Olympics also won the first gold medal Saturday.

Enlarge

By Christopher Hanewinckel, USA TODAY Sports

Top-ranked Yi Siling of China captures the first gold medal of the London Games with a victory in the women's 10-meter air rifle competition at Royal Artillery Barracks.

Yi Siling of China, who earned a shooting quota spot when she won the world women's 10-meter air rifle championship in Munich two years ago, capped her domination of the discipline since then with the Olympic title.

"I feel like I had a lot of luck," Yi said, even though the results said otherwise.

Polish soldier Sylwia Bogacka topped qualifying and had gold in her grasp until the third-to-last shot. She recovered to claim silver for her first major medal.

Yu Dan of China earned the bronze. China became the first team since 1988 to have two medalists in the event.

Nur Suryani Mohamed Taibi of Malaysia, competing while eight months pregnant, was 34th in the field of 56. She was relieved not to go into labor during the 75-minute qualifying.

"She kicked only three or four times," she said of her baby. "I told her to behave herself, and she always listens to me."

Yi, renowned for her ability to stay unruffled, cried with relief in her coach's arms after the final and welcomed the crush of Chinese media, saying their enthusiasm for her made her feel like a movie star.

Movies may not be far off for the woman known in her homeland as the Shooting Beauty.

But all she and Yu could think of afterward, aside from celebrating with teammates, were their families. Yi said her father has been suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure for a year.

Yu became emotional in thanking her family, especially her father, for their support. She stood at the news conference and bowed to the TV cameras and wiped tears.

"They never let me worry," Yu said.

Yi has made it to 12 finals in 15 competitions over the past four years, and medaled nine times. She's the world and Asian champion. Yet she admitted to nerves throughout the event at the Royal Artillery Barracks.

She couldn't catch Bogacka until the Pole flubbed her eighth shot in the 10-shot final. Bogacka scored 9.7, her worst of the final, and dropped to third, but a near-perfect score, 10.8 of 10.9, on her final shot gave her silver ahead of Yu.

"It happens sometimes," Bogacka said of the 9.7. "I didn't prepare well for the shot, but I knew what I did wrong and fixed it for the last shot. I saw in my mind the last shot, 10.8, and when I saw it on the monitor I was very happy."

She's the first Polish shooting medalist since 2000.

Defending champion Katerina Emmons of the Czech Republic, who scraped into the final from a qualifying shootoff, finished fourth. Beijing silver medalist Lioubov Galkina of Russia was 10th.

2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Related posts:
China's supremacy at Olympics
Malaysian lawyer/former golf president in Olympic Court ...
Olympics and business

Eurozone unemployment hits new record

Unemployment is at the highest rate since the euro was launched in 1999

The jobless rate in the 17 countries that use the single currency was 10.4% in December, unchanged from November's figure which was revised up from 10.3%.

Some 16.5 million people were out of work in the eurozone in December, up 751,000 on the year before.

The highest unemployment rate remains in Spain (22.9%), while the lowest is in Austria (4.1%).

Unemployment has been rising throughout 2011, as the debt crisis in the region has continued. In December 2010, the unemployment rate in the euro area was 10%.



Investment delays
 
Guillaume Menuet, economist at Citigroup, said he expected the number of people out of work to increase throughout 2012.

"If you think about the direction of employment expectations that you see across various business surveys, the outlook for employment doesn't look particularly enticing, simply because the uncertainty is very high.

“Start Quote

Much energy and argument has been spent on this agreement. It is questionable, however, whether it will have much influence on the immediate crisis. ”

Gavin Hewitt BBC Europe editor

 

"In many cases you find firms continuing to delay investment projects. For those that are still making profits, hiring is being frozen, and for those which are under pressure to hit results or losing money, job losses are becoming the only solution that they have," he said. 

In the 27 EU countries, the unemployment rate was 9.9% in December, with 23.8 million people out of work. November's figure was also revised up from 9.8% to 9.9%.

The biggest increases over the past year were seen in Greece, Cyprus and Spain.

The largest falls took place in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Deteriorating situation

  The issue of jobs and economic growth was a key area for discussion at this week's summit of EU leaders in Brussels.

On Monday, figures showed that the Spanish economy shrank by 0.3% in the last quarter of 2011. It is now widely expected that Spain will enter recession in the first quarter of this year.

Also on Monday, France cut its growth forecast for this year to 0.5% from 1% "to take into account the deterioration of the economic situation".

At the Brussels summit, 25 of the 27 member states agreed to join a fiscal treaty, aimed at much closer co-ordination of budget policy across the EU to prevent excessive debts accumulating.

The UK and the Czech Republic did not sign up to it. UK Prime Minister David Cameron said he had "legal concerns" about the use of EU institutions in enforcing the treaty, while the Czechs cited "constitutional reasons" for their refusal.

Newscribe : get free news in real time