Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Wednesday with Israel’s newly returned judo delegation to the Olympic Games in Rio, telling bronze medal winners Or Sasson and Yarden Gerbi that they are inspiration to the whole country.
Israel’s Olympic bronze medalist Or Sasson said that tensions ran high between the Egyptian and Israeli judo delegations even before the now-infamous rejected handshake with Sasson’s Egyptian competitor Islam El Shehaby.
“I didn’t expect this kind of madness,” said Olympic athlete Yarden Gerbi as she returned to Israel, after having won the bronze medal in judo at the Rio 2016 Summer Games.
The UAE’s single medal so far in the 2016 Olympic Games was won by a Moldavian who was offered citizenship for this purpose.
Despite Wednesday night’s Rio Olympics lineup of top athletes including U.S. beach volleyball stars Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross, superstar American swimmer and multiple gold medal winner Katie Ledecky, and Japanese iconic gymnast Kohei Uchimura, Nielsen ratings saw a drop in prime viewing for NBC, down 14 percent from the comparable night in 2012 at the London Olympic games.
Egyptian judo fighter Islam El Shehaby was loudly booed at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics after his first-round loss to Israel’s fifth-ranked Or Sasson, when El Shehaby refused to shake Sasson’s hand, in a major breach of judo etiquette.
The 2016 Olympic Games have been billed as an opportunity to put politics aside in the spirit of international camaraderie, but that’s not necessarily how it’s working out for Israeli athletes.
The Rio 2016 Olympic Games began on a sour note for the Israeli delegation, but not one relating to the actual competition. When the delegation was ready to board the bus to the Maracana stadium in the Brazilian city, they were physically prevented from doing so by the Lebanese delegation, already aboard, according Israeli sailor Udi Gal.
When Kenyan-born Lonah Chemtai came to Tel Aviv in 2009 to care for the children of her country’s ambassador to the Jewish state, she never dreamed that one day she would run for Israel at the Olympics.
The United States Olympic Committee told U.S. sports federations that athletes and staff concerned for their health over the Zika virus should consider not going to the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in August.
