Nordics

No more international club soccer matches will be held in Stockholm because of the high police costs of manning them, Swedish Football Association president Lars-Ake Lagrell said.

MTG, the Scandinavian media company, has bought 17% of the share capital of Stockholm-based soccer club Djurgaarden, worth SKr7m ($781,000), according to news sources.

Stockholm?s Olympic Stadium will host its first speedway meeting for nearly thirty years when the Speedway Grand Prix hits the Swedish capital on Saturday 29 September 2001.

UEFA has ordered the Moldova soccer federation (MSF) to close down the main stadium in the capital of the tiny, impoverished ex-Soviet republic for safety reasons.

The Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) said on Wednesday it had summoned Amore Vita cycling team director Gianluigi Barsottelli to a hearing on January 7 over doping allegations. CONI said in a statement its anti-doping commission had summoned Barsottelli after studying documents from Bologna magistrates who have been conducting a wide-ranging investigation into alleged doping in cycling. A spokesman for the Italian Professional Cyclists' League said Barsottelli's team was affiliated to the English cycling federation this year.

Setanta.com, the Irish sports content provider, has signed two contracts worth #1million ($1.45m) with mobile phone companies in Norway.

The Salt Lake City bid scandal has claimed a second International Olympic Committee (IOC) victim when Bashir Mohamed Attarabulsi of Libya resigned as a member today.

Australia's oldest living Olympic athlete, who competed in the 1928 Amsterdam Games, opened the village for the Sydney Olympics as the first of an eventual 10,000 competitors moved in on Saturday.

The bitter battle for control of Russian football has heated up with the head of the league questioning the veteran federation boss about allegations that large sums were diverted from soccer into banks abroad.

Sepp Blatter's bid to become FIFA president was given a significant boost on Friday when England declared it would vote for him in Monday's election.

Former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson will face Denmark's Brian Nielsen in a 10-round fight on September 8 at Parken Stadium in Copenhagen, cable television carrier Showtime has said.

The European Triathlon Union (ETU) says it is prepared to take legal action to recover the debts owed by the eight national triathlon federations, which last week announced the unsanctioned formation of the breakaway Triathlon Council for Europe.

Less than a week after UEFA's chief executive Gerhard Aigner accused the media of exaggerating the violence at the UEFA Cup final its executive board agreed on Tuesday to investigate "sensationalist" coverage of the showpiece event.

The U.S. women's World Cup winning soccer team will boycott the Australia Cup next month because of unresolved contract negotiations. Instead, The U.S. Soccer Federation will send young players to the four-nation tournament.

Olympic leaders said on Friday they would be holding immediate talks on whether Salt Lake City broke Olympic rules in its campaign to win the race to stage the 2002 Winter Games.

Sweden?s answer to Rupert Murdoch, Jan Stenbeck, has bought a 17 per cent stake in soccer team Djurgarden. Stenbeck's company, Modern Times Group (MTG), owns several media companies, including the free commuter newspaper Metro which was introduced in the UK two years ago.