The athletes were charged after attempting to gain entry to Olympic venue Carioca 1 for the Australian men’s basketball semi-final loss to Serbia on Friday night.
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The athletes’ no fly ban was lifted once they travelled to a Rio courthouse to sign papers and conclude the affair, from a procedural point of view, that saw them detained on Friday night until 5.30am on Saturday.
Two years ago, Coates called Rio’s preparations the “worst ever”, and during the Games, said it was “the most difficult” Olympics the IOC had ever seen, due to Brazil’s political and economic issues.
The Australian team’s charter flight leaves tomorrow, but police are still holding their passports, Australian Olympic mission chief Kitty Chiller told reporters, adding that it was still unclear how and when they could reclaim the passports.
“It was a very hard night for them and it shouldn’t have come to that”, she said.
The athletes knew they were using tampered accreditations but Chiller says it’s not their fault.
But the AOC said it would pay the fines and hoped the athletes would be able to leave Rio with the rest of the Australian team on Monday night.
Ten Australian athletes have been fined in Rio and given good behaviour bonds for misusing their Olympic accreditation.
“The British are just phenomenal when it comes to the Olympic Games, and we’re all just scratching our heads going ‘how do they lift so much when in so many events they have not even been in contention in the world championships?'”.
“I became aware of it a few days earlier and I put a stop to it”.
As far as television broadcasting is concerned, Channel Seven marked its Olympics comeback by doing an excellent job in utilising its main channel, as well as two of its secondary channels (7TWO and 7mate), and its “Olympics on 7” app, to broadcast the event to millions of Australians nationwide.
“I said that’s not the way that our team should behave and it shouldn’t be facilitated”.
UK, on the other hand, has rewritten their Olympic history, moving ahead of China into second place in the Rio 2016 medal tally with 27 golds, 23 silver and 17 bronze medals.
It may seem trivial but Rio authorities are in no mood for any more misbehaviour from athletes after the incident involving American swimmer Ryan Lochte, who lied about being held up and robbed.
So it is little surprise ASC president John Wylie, now under fire for the Winning Edge strategy (ironically adopted from a similar British approach) of pushing more funding towards big sports such as swimming and cycling that mostly failed to fire in Rio, wants a similar lottery in Australia. “Security was a massive challenge, transport had its problems”.
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Palmer was called in by police after initially refusing to take official action over his claims an armed man had forced him to withdraw $1000 from an ATM in Copacabana.
