Father of double Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen found guilty of hitting daughter but avoids jail
The father of the double Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen has been found guilty of hitting the Norwegian runner's younger sister, Ingrid, with a wet towel, and handed a 15-day suspended sentence.
However, Gjert Ingebrigtsen, who coached his Jakob to 1500m gold at the Tokyo Games in 2021 before an acrimonious split a year later, was acquitted of the same charges against Jakob after a court in Norway found there was 'reasonable doubt' about the accusations.
Ingrid, who left the family home aged 15 after a series of incidents, was also awarded compensation of 10,000 kroner (£744) by the court.
The verdict marks another extraordinary episode in the life of the family that became huge reality TV stars in Norway after the docu-series The Ingebrigtsens, which charted their lives and eccentric nature, became a huge phenomenon.
Prosecutors had called for Gjert to be jailed for two and a half years for what they told the court in the Norwegian town of Sagnes was a 'regime of physical and verbal abuse' towards Jakob and his younger sister, Ingrid, which spanned a decade.
It followed testimony from Jakob, who said that he had been a victim of domestic violence at the hands of his father, who had punched and kicked him as well as 'controlled' him.
Early in the six-week trial, Jakob alleged that when he was eight his father had punched him in the head 'many times' after receiving a negative report about his behaviour from school.
In another incident around the same time, Jakob claimed he had been playing in the street on a scooter when his father jumped on him and kicked him in the stomach.
The court also heard that Gjert had used threats, coercion and violence against Jakon's younger sister, Ingrid, including 'whipping' her in the face with a wet towel in 2022 after he had refused to let her play outside with friends.
In court Gjert accepted that he had sometimes been demanding while coaching his three sons, Jakob, Henrik and Filip, to major international titles.
The 59-year-old also acknowledged that he had once thrown the family PlayStation out of a second floor window after a row. However he denied all allegations of abuse and broke down in tears as he told the court that he had never hit anyone in his life.
He also admitted his regret at falling out with Ingrid, who left the family home at 15 after the towel incident.
'I miss her every day,' Gjert said. 'She is the last thing I think about when I go to bed at night, and the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. The loss is extreme.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Chinese fans bid emotional farewell to retiring 'Uncle Boll'
June 17 (Reuters) - Chinese table tennis fans bid an emotional farewell to their 'Uncle Boll', German former world number one Timo Boll who challenged China's long-time dominance of the sport. The 44-year-old, who retired from international competition last year with four Olympic medals (two silver and two bronze), played his final professional match in Frankfurt on Sunday. "Thank you to the Chinese fans for your deep affection that crossed national borders," Boll posted on Weibo after his team lost the Bundesliga final. "From Ma Lin to Fan Zhendong, every clash with a great opponent has been one of my most cherished honours," Boll said, referring to two Chinese Olympic champions. The post received millions of views in China, where table tennis is widely regarded as the country's national sport.
The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
Everyone can see the footballs but only those with a high IQ can spot the 3 odd ones out in under 30 seconds
WITH the FIFA Club World Cup kicking off, now is the perfect time to test your vision with this football-themed brain teaser. The tricky brainteaser image was created by Betboo to test your visual awareness skills. 2 Featuring red and white footballs on a grassy pitch, the puzzle asks you to find the three mistakes in the image. Get ready and set yourself a timer as the record to beat the challenge is 30 seconds. Challenges like these help to keep your brain active and improve your critical thinking skills. Image-based puzzles can be particularly good for improving your observational skills as it forces you to use your peripheral vision. It can also improve your organisational skills as you have to use a methodical approach to notice the mistakes. The best way to approach the puzzle is to carefully look at each row of footballs. This method makes it easier to spot any differences in their appearance. The real test comes when you set yourself a timer for the puzzle, as regularly doing brainteasers can keep your focus sharp. How can optical illusions and brainteasers help me? Engaging in activities like solving optical illusions and brainteasers can have many cognitive benefits as it can stimulate various brain regions. Some benefits include: Cognitive stimulation: Engaging in these activities challenges the brain, promoting mental agility and flexibility. Problem-solving skills: Regular practice enhances analytical thinking and problem-solving abilities. Memory improvement: These challenges often require memory recall and can contribute to better memory function. Creativity: They encourage thinking outside the box, fostering creativity and innovative thought processes. Focus and attention: Working on optical illusions and brainteasers requires concentration, contributing to improved focus. Stress relief: The enjoyable nature of these puzzles can act as a form of relaxation and stress relief. Make sure you've found the three mistakes as we're going to reveal the answer below. For those of you struggling to find the answer, the key is looking closely at the pentagon design. On the middle right white circle of each incorrect football, the bottom line of the pentagon is missing. If you've spotted it once it should make it easier to find the other mistakes. 2 The three faulty footballs can be found in the bottom right corner, just below the line on the left, and on the upper right side of the circles. With such an intricate design, these brainteasers help to improve your attention to detail. Different types of brainteasers can challenge different parts of your brain. Puzzles that ask you to find the hidden object are a good way to improve your visual skills, while spotting the odd one out might be a good IQ test. Maths-based visual puzzles can also be a good way to improve your mental maths skills. All of these puzzles help to keep your brain active and can be a good part of your daily routine.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
From Tyson to TikTok: the boxing fan generational gap is widening
Boxing is popular with young people in countries like the United Kingdom and Mexico. But it doesn't resonate with young sports fans in the United States the way it once did. Fans of a sport – particularly, team sports - develop lifelong allegiances at an early age and often pass it on to their children. There was a time when fathers and sons in America sat down in front of a television set together and watched Gillette Friday Night Fights or boxing on weekend afternoons. Now, if they sit down together at all, they watch football. Boxing's proponents point to statistics that show the average boxing fan in the United States is younger than the average fan of many other sports (including football and baseball). But they're talking about fish in a much smaller pond. There are far fewer young boxing fans in America than there are young fans of any major sport. That means there are fewer young boxing fans who will grow up to be old ones, and pass down their passion to the next generation. Boxing, perhaps more than any other sport, cherishes and relies on its history to build a following. Young people today care less about the history of sports than earlier generations did. Boxing fans in America talk more about fights from years ago than about fights today. The sport's most recognizable figures are old – Mike Tyson, Don King, Michael Buffer and, until recently, George Foreman. The nature of boxing also makes it difficult to build a young following. Children often become fans of a sport because they play it from an early age. They play baseball in the park, football in the street, and basketball in the schoolyard. Tennis and golf are more exclusive, but many children find a way to play them. Kids might get into an occasional fight. But virtually none of them box. Added to this, boxing is largely inaccessible to young fans as an in-person spectator sport. Adolescents root for their school teams. Going to a high school football or basketball game accentuates the feeling that they're part of a group. There are no high school boxing teams. Very few young people have the opportunity to actually go to a fight. The powers that be in boxing have exacerbated these conditions by adopting an economic model that cuts off the sport's flagship events and most popular fighters from potential fans. The NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball prioritize reaching a large audience in their television and streaming deals. But there's no easy access to big-time boxing in the United States today without paying for it. And young people don't expect to pay – let alone, pay a lot - for online content. Equally troubling, the multitude of world sanctioning bodies and 'championship' belts of dubious provenance means that young people (and older fans too) don't know who the real champions are. And championships are important. Other sports culminate in the Super Bowl, World Series, NBA finals, Stanley Cup, Olympics, World Cup, US Open, NCAA tournaments, and other events that fire the imagination and produce legitimate champions. Too many of today's boxing 'champions' have been maneuvered to their titles by the payment of sanctioning fees and mismatches against weak opponents. The Los Angeles Lakers couldn't go to NBA commissioner Adam Silver this year and say, 'We just lost to the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first round of the play-offs. But LeBron James is a big name and we'll pay you X amount of money if you sanction us to play against the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA finals.' Young people are particularly susceptible to suggestion. They can be coaxed into buying a lot of things through clever marketing. But they don't buy sports that bore them. And too many of today's fights – let's be honest – are boring mismatches. College football fans tolerate Alabama v Louisiana-Monroe as the second game of the season because they know that, later in the year, the Crimson Tide will play Georgia, LSU, and Oklahoma. If 90% of college football games were on a par with Alabama v Louisiana-Monroe, college football would be far less popular than it is today. An unfair decision at the end of a fight sours viewers and makes watching the event a less satisfactory experience than would otherwise be the case. Incompetent and, in some instances, corrupt judging alienates boxing fans of all ages. Then there's the difficulty of actually watching the fights. Today's flagship bouts generally aren't contested until close to midnight on the East Coast. Can you imagine an NFL game starting at midnight eastern time and costing $89.99 to watch? I didn't think so. The facts speak for themselves. HBO, Showtime, and the four major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX) all played a significant role in boxing. Now they've all walked away from the sport. Former Showtime Sports president Stephen Espinoza says that boxing has traditional strength in Black and Latino households (which skew younger than the overall sports audience) and that, in recent years, boxing has seen a rise in the young white demographic. But these inroads with a new generation, Espinoza notes, 'seem to be a function of influencer boxing with Jake Paul leading the charge.' An influencer like Paul standing out is unsurprising, and says a lot about boxing's limited appeal. Young people understand who the great athletes are in other sports. Ask kids to name an active professional boxer today and they're more likely to name Jake Paul than Terence Crawford. That said; traditional promoters have reservations about fights involving Paul and his influencer brethren. Eddie Hearn jumpstarted social-media-influencer boxing in the United States in 2019 when he promoted Logan Paul v KSI on Dazn. 'I made money but I hated it,' Hearn says, looking back on that venture. 'The build-up was great. The numbers were great. But the product wasn't.' Hearn also notes that college sports have a tiny audience in the UK but siphon off a huge amount of fan allegiance among young people in the United States, some of which would otherwise be devoted to boxing. Meanwhile, Frank Warren points a finger at American promoters and maintains, 'We have a great young audience for boxing in the UK. That's because we promote fighters in their home areas. We build their fan base among their contemporaries in pubs and wherever else they might be, and it spreads from there. It's called promotion. When you do four-wall deals [events where the promoter moves into a venue but leaves the promoting largely to others] the way they're done in America, people stop promoting.' Most pre-fight promotion for big fights in the United States is cookie-cutter and boring. There's a formulaic kick-off press conference. Then the fighters disappear except for (maybe) a media workout and some tepid media releases from training camp. Fight week arrives. A 'grand arrival' (which isn't very grand) is followed by a formulaic final pre-press conference and phony weigh-in (the real weigh-in having been conducted hours earlier behind closed doors). The best way to reach young people is through the internet. A handful of individual fighters have capitalized on social media. And promoters like Matchroom, Queensberry, and Top Rank maintain an active social media presence. But there have been no effective social media campaigns on behalf of boxing as a whole because no one is looking out for the overall good of the sport in the way that the central governing authorities in other sports do. 'There's no cohesive strategy, no central organization coordinating the demographic information and outreach,' Espinoza says. 'To do that, you'd need the major promoters to turn over their information to one entity, and that's unlikely to happen.' And just because boxing is moving to streaming doesn't mean that it will reach the youth market. When PBC signed its deal with Amazon in late-2023, the reaction was, 'This will be big!' But there hasn't been much of a marketing push from Amazon, and PBC's fights have attracted a disappointingly small audience. But for all the sport's flaws, walking into an arena on fight night and seeing a boxing ring illuminated beneath bright shining lights is akin to entering a magical kingdom. That's what Reece Chapman, a 16-year-old from Helena, Montana, saw when he entered the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night for Matchroom's fight card headlined by Richardson Hitchens v George Kambosos. Montana isn't known for boxing. The only fight of note to occur there took place more than a century ago (on 4 July 1923) when Jack Dempsey decisioned Tommy Gibbons in Shelby. The event was a financial disaster. Four local banks that backed the venture were forced into bankruptcy. Only two professional fight cards were contested in Montana in 2024, two in 2023, one in 2022, and none so far this year. Fights in Montana are regulated by the neighboring Wyoming Combat Sports Commission. Reece, then 13 years old, went to his first fight when Top Rank promoted an eight-bout card at the Hulu Theater on 30 October 2022. A word of disclosure here. I'm his great-uncle. I brought him. He was into the scene. ('It's really cool; how fast the fighters' hands are; how focused they are; the way they move around the ring'). And enthralled as the night wore on ('I've never seen anything like this … This is really really cool … Wow! Wow! Wow!'). This past week, Reece was in New York and had a more immersive boxing experience. With the help of Anthony Leaver (Matchroom's head of US media), he was credentialed to attend fight week activities for the Hitchens-Kambosos card and the fights themselves. Reece watches Top Rank boxing on ESPN with his father. But Top Rank's contract with the cable giant ends next month and won't be renewed. There are a few active fighters who Reece knows of and likes. But not many. He can tell you who plays quarterback for his favorite college and pro football teams but came up short on naming Oleksandr Usyk as heavyweight champion of the world. His classmates in school are far more focused on MMA than boxing; in large part because of UFC's social media outreach. Last year's encounter between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul was the first boxing match that his contemporaries were excited about. Reece watched it on Netflix and thought it was 'stupid' but that the Katie Taylor v Armanda Serrano co-feature was 'great.' On Thursday, Reece attended the final pre-fight press conference at Madison Square Garden and gave it a mixed review. He liked the glimpse it gave him of each fighter's personality and particularly liked Australian heavyweight prospect Teremoana Samson Junior Leon Teremoana. Then Hitchens and Kambosos got into an ugly shoving match with the usual profanities. That struck Reece as (here's that word again) 'stupid'. Reece also attended the Friday weigh-in and arrived at MSG on fight night with a sense of anticipation. In terms of outcome, the fights went as expected. The fighters in the red corner were all (to use one of Hearn's favorite words) 'massive' underdogs. The favorite didn't just win every fight. The favorite won every round. Reece was captivated by David Diamante, who has become part of Matchroom's branding and (no disrespect to Michael Buffer) is his favorite ring announcer. He also noted, 'Being at the fights makes me understand how hard the fighters hit and how much skill is involved.' The most impressive performances of the evening were turned in by Andy Cruz and Richardson Hitchens. But Teremoana, who fought in the fourth bout of the evening, was the fighter who most captured Reece's attention. Teremoana is a former Olympian, 6ft 6in, 265lb, articulate, friendly, and charismatic. Reece had sat in on an interview with him after the Friday weigh-in and asked several questions. At the end of the interview, they posed for a photo together. Now Teremoana was facing 9-and-0 Aleem Whitfield, who looked grossly out-of-shape but can punch a bit. Matchroom had spent generously to build a giant video screen and runway to showcase the fighters' ring entrances. The energy level in the arena picked up considerably when Teremoana danced his way to the ring, turning an often-banal ritual into a joyous celebratory occasion. He lit up the room. The crowd (which minutes earlier hadn't known who he was) liked him. When the bell for round one rang, Reece leaned forward with heightened anticipation. This wasn't television, which cosmetizes the violence of a prizefight. He could see the emotions on each fighter's face and hear punches as they landed. 'I'm nervous,' he said. 'I feel like I'm watching a friend.' Not to worry. Teremoana kept Whitfield at bay with his jab and backed him into a corner. Then … WHACK!!! The damage started with a Teremoana left hook that landed flush up top. The battering that followed was reminiscent of Gerry Cooney hammering a defenseless Ken Norton at Madison Square Garden four decades ago. Referee David Fields halted the carnage as a barely-conscious Whitfield slid to the canvas two minutes 28 seconds into the first round. Teremoana has star quality. And he can punch. What happens when he has to walk through the proverbial fire in a fight? When someone takes him into deep water, will he be able to swim? And how is his chin? It will be worth watching him again to find out. When fans go to the fights, they hope to take away at least one 'Wow!' moment. Teremoana was a 'Wow!' moment. What most attracts young sports fans? Stars. Heavyweights with personality who can punch are a magnetic attraction. If Teremoana proves to be good enough in the ring, he's the type of fighter boxing could build a young fan base around.
