These Athletes Use Their Arms as Well as Legs

No need now to ask if the shooting sports have any practical application.

Near Warsaw recently, coaches from the biathlon teams of Russia and Belarus were driving along a rural road. Their teams had just competed in the World Championships of biathlon, which combines skiing and shooting.

Four bandits in a truck appeared, forced the coaches’ car off the road and demanded money. The coaches stalled, knowing a bus carrying their athletes was behind them.

When the bus pulled up and athletes poured out with rifles ready, the bandits vanished in a hurry, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

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Trivia time: Who is credited with being the first in sports to say, “We was robbed!”

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Cool it, kid: Hotshot NBA rookie Allen Iverson is getting booed almost everywhere he goes now and can’t seem to understand why. So he has decided to blame the media.

But it wasn’t the media that, in Iverson’s second NBA game, challenged Michael Jordan, then engaged in an on-court shouting match with him.

Writes Newsday’s Rob Parker: “If you want to become a villain in NBA America, attacking His Airness, one of the most beloved athletes in the world since Muhammad Ali, will get you there in a New York minute.”

Then there’s the crowd that travels with Iverson.

Parker: “He travels with a posse, at least one member of which has a criminal record, according to a Washington Post story, and many of the others would best be described as shady.”

Iverson: “They write so many negative things about me in the paper, so many things that are not true.”

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Great advice: During a recent halftime ceremony at a Lansing (Mich.) Everett High basketball game, Magic Johnson got weepy when recalling a formative figure from his high school days.

The school was retiring his number and Johnson broke into tears, wondering what his fate would have been had he not heeded the advice of a teacher, Frances Byrd, who urged him to go to summer school to improve his reading skills.

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Justice at last? It looks as if the IOC may be close to awarding boxer Roy Jones the gold medal millions believe was rightfully his at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

Documents found after the breakup of East Germany show evidence of bribes paid to Olympic boxing judges by South Koreans. The gold-medal bout was “won” by South Korean Park Si-hun.

But should Jones get Park’s medal or a newly struck one?

USA Boxing’s former president, Jerry Dusenberry, says Park should give up the medal.

“He should give it up because he didn’t earn it,” he said.

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Trivia answer: Joe Jacobs, manager of boxer Max Schmeling, after his fighter had lost a 1932 heavyweight championship bout to Jack Sharkey.

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And finally: What do you get when you play in 2,315 consecutive major league games?

Cal Ripken Jr. hopes it will be a new three-year deal with the Baltimore Orioles worth as much as $7.5 million a year. He’s getting $6.2 million this year.