
Olympic swimmer engulfed in ‘inappropriate' behaviour accusations makes fiery statement
Article content
Luana Alonso will no longer stay silent.
Article content
The Paraguayan swimmer who reportedly was booted out of the Olympic Village during last year's Summer Games has fired back at 'false rumours' surrounding her departure from Paris.
Article content
Article content
Alonso posted a fiery statement on her Instagram stories this week, hitting out at the reports that she was removed for creating an 'inappropriate atmosphere.'
Article content
'Let me make this clear: I left the Olympic Village on my own,' she wrote on Wednesday. 'These are false rumours that have hurt my name and my career.'
Article content
The 21-year-old swimmer competed for Paraguay in the women's 100-metre butterfly, but failed to reach the semifinals – and then seemingly announced her abrupt retirement from the sport in a post on Instagram.
Article content
But instead of heading home, Alonso stayed in the French capital to see the sights – which were well-documented on her social media account – before reportedly got her booted by her country's Olympic committee for creating an 'inappropriate atmosphere.'
Article content
Article content
'Her presence is creating an inappropriate atmosphere within Team Paraguay,' Larissa Schaerer, the head of the Paraguayan Olympic Committee (COP), said in a statement at the time.
Article content
'The Paraguayan Olympic team claimed I created an 'inappropriate environment' simply because I decided I didn't want to swim anymore,' she said. 'They tried to take my accreditation away, but that's not something they had the right to do. I chose not to hand it over and apparently that was 'inappropriate' to them.'
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Winnipeg Free Press
3 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Enhanced Games perpetuate a growing problem
Opinion We appear to be entering a new golden age of steroids. Years of scandals out of the Olympics, pro baseball, pro wrestling, and other athletic fields should have put to bed the notion that there is any athletic or cultural value in using performance-enhancing drugs, or PEDs, to get an edge. With every suspension, with every prize stripped from a competitor or left tainted by the way it was obtained, the message was clear — it's cheating, and it's not worth it. Some haven't received the message. The Enhanced Games hopes to hold its first-ever event in Las Vegas, Nev. FILE Are steroids back? The Enhanced Games, as the name suggests, is a multi-sport athletic competition in which athletes are openly using PEDs. The games' website makes much ado about the close supervision the athletes will be under, overseen by medical professionals to ensure their health and safety. But it's not that simple. Supervising an athlete's PED use in the short term may prevent a tragedy during training, or even in the short term, but long-term use of these substances wreaks havoc on the body, affecting the heart and other organs. In addition to aggravating the global athletic community, the games necessarily subject their athletes to likely future complications. However, the Enhanced Games are merely a very out-in-the-open manifestation of some sectors' increasing comfort with the use of PEDs — particularly on social media. Where show business has a long history of establishing unhealthy body standards, social media has stepped in to normalize and perpetuate them further. A study by body image experts at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia found that exposure to idealized bodies on social media 'was directly linked with negative body image issues and greater propensity to seek out anabolic-androgenic steroids,' according to an account of the study published by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. And in the world of social media, where people tend to present idealized versions of themselves, these jacked-and-toned influencers are not always achieving their results the way they describe. The 'Liver King' a.k.a. Brian Johnson, spent years on social media touting his commitment to the 'ancestral lifestyle' — a life devoted to hard, rugged work and a diet ahistorically rich in organ meats, often consumed raw. He co-owns a supplement company. An email leak in 2022 revealed that he was a regular user of steroids, spending as much as US$11,000 per month on PEDs. This came as no shock to scrutinizers who wondered how else a man in his 40s could have achieved such a swollen, muscular physique. Weekday Mornings A quick glance at the news for the upcoming day. And he's not the only one. Fitness influencers in all corners of the internet make their money selling advice to people setting unreachable goals. Sometimes, the shortcut of steroids has consequences, as in the case of influencer Jaxon Tippet, who spoke of his own past steroid use. He died of a heart attack at 30. And the Liver King? He continues to post workouts to Instagram, and still touts his hypermasculine ideals. But he also, in December last year, shared on his Instagram a litany of his health problems: a fatty liver; a twisted kidney; a 'necrotic fold'; and a mass in his colon. People are already beset with unhealthy examples of unachievable bodies, with little to no discussion of the terrible toll PED use has over time. Your muscles will be huge, sure — but so will your heart, and liver. The Enhanced Games only promise to give more good publicity to a terrible fitness trend.


CBC
9 hours ago
- CBC
Bell Canadian Swimming Trials: Day 1
Watch the opening day preliminaries from the Bell Canadian Swimming Trials at Saanich Commonwealth Place in Victoria, B.C.


Winnipeg Free Press
10 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
NBA's talks about new league in Europe are continuing, though the process remains in early stages
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The NBA's talks with FIBA and other entities about the process of adding a new league in Europe are continuing, Commissioner Adam Silver said, though he noted that it may take at least a couple more years to turn the ideas into reality. Silver spoke at a league event to unveil a refurbished Boys & Girls Club in Oklahoma City on Friday — an off day for the NBA Finals — and said it's difficult to put a specific timeline on the Europe plans. 'I will say it's measured in years, not months,' Silver said. 'So, we're at least a couple years away from launching. It would be an enormous undertaking. And while we want to move forward at a deliberate pace, we also want to make sure that we're consulting with all the appropriate stakeholders, meaning the existing league, its teams, European players, media companies, marketing partners. There's a lot of work to be done.' Silver and FIBA secretary general Andreas Zagklis announced in March that the league and the game's governing body are finally taking long-awaited steps to form a new league, with an initial target of 16 teams. It had been talked about for years, and decades even on some levels. And since the NBA and FIBA went public with their idea to move forward, talks have gotten more constructive, Silver said. Silver said the NBA has been talking directly with the EuroLeague and with some member clubs about a partnership. It's his preference that the NBA work with the existing league on some level, though it's still too early to say exactly what that means. 'Either way, we continue to feel there are an enormous number of underserved basketball fans in Europe and that there's a strong opportunity to have another league styled after the NBA,' Silver said. About one in every six current NBA players hails from Europe, including Denver's Nikola Jokic (Serbia) and Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece) — who have combined for five of the last seven MVP awards — along with the Los Angeles Lakers' Luka Doncic (Slovenia) and San Antonio's Victor Wembanyama (France). The NBA's board of governors will talk more about next steps with the European plans in July at their scheduled meeting in Las Vegas, Silver said. It's possible that the European venture could be unveiled in some way — or possibly start — around the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, just given how much attention will be on international basketball at that time. Thursdays Keep up to date on sports with Mike McIntyre's weekly newsletter. 'That might be a good launching pad for an announcement around a new competition,' Silver said. Some of the cities that are expected to have interest in being part of the new venture include London, Manchester, Rome and Munich. There will be others, of course. 'We haven't had direct conversations yet,' Silver said. 'But there have been several organizations that have come forward and said they would be interested and potential owners in operating in those major markets in Europe.' ___ AP NBA: