Olympic

Victoria Manalo Draves, the first woman to win two gold medals in diving in the same Olympics — in the three-meter springboard and the 10-meter platform competitions in London in 1948 — and the first Asian American to win an Olympic medal, has died. She was 85. Draves died April 11 from complications of pancreatic cancer at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, said her husband and former coach, Lyle Draves. A native of San Francisco whose father was Filipino and whose mother was English, Draves was the national platform diving champion for three years running and the reigning national indoor springboard champion when she arrived at the Olympics in 1948.

Kim Rhode isn't easily rattled. She competed against adults at 13 to win her first world title in the shooting sport of American skeet. She won an Olympic gold medal in double trap at the 1996 Atlanta Games five days after her 17th birthday, the youngest female Olympic shooting champion in the Games' history, and returned to win bronze in 2000 and gold again in 2004. When women's double trap was dropped from the Olympics, she switched to skeet and virtually started over. All she did was set a world record in her first World Cup event and win a silver medal at the 2008 Beijing Games.

DALLAS -- Everything about Holley Mangold is oversized. Her personality. Her laugh. Her ambition. But the first thing most people notice is her body, which, at 5 feet 9 and 350 pounds, is hard to miss. "I'm huge," Mangold says with pride, not political correctness. "I love my body. I think it's perfect. "I don't know what my personality would be like if I wasn't so huge. " She has a pretty good idea what her athletic career would be like, though. And it wouldn't include a trip to the Olympic Games this summer.

LONDON -- Felix Sanchez has won gold in the 400-meter hurdles eight years after his first Olympic triumph. Sanchez, the former USC standout who represents the Dominican Republic, recorded a season-best time of 47.63 seconds Tuesday to become the Olympic champion again, this time a few weeks short of his 35 th birthday. Obviously, he has aged well: his winning time on Tuesday was identical to his winning time in Athens. Michael Tinsley of Little Rock, Ark., was second in a personal-best 47.91 seconds and Javier Culson of Puerto Rico was third in 48.10 seconds.

The city of Los Angeles - which knows something about "three-peats" - has notified Olympic officials that it wants to host yet another Summer Games. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sent a letter to the U.S. Olympic Committee confirming that civic, business and community leaders have lined up to express their "enthusiastic interest" in bidding for the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics. That would bring the sporting world's grandest event back to the site where it took place in 1932 and 1984.

Sebastian Coe, chairman of the organizing committee for the upcoming London Olympics, wasn't merely catering to his audience Friday at the International Olympic Committee's conference on Women and Sport when he said women should be represented at every level of sports. Coe practices what he preaches, working alongside an array of women in senior positions at LOCOG, as the London organizing committee is known. Women serve as LOCOG's director of strategic programs, director of sport, general counsel and human resources director, all key responsibilities.

We're carrying our own Olympic torch here at the Ministry: our burning flame for the royal-and-celebrity watch we're kicking off on the eve of the London Games.  Energized by Friday's opening ceremonies, world athletes will compete for gold medals while their famous admirers hole up in the glamorous bones of London Town, but make no mistake: This is royals country.   So what better way to drum up excitement than trotting out Great Britain's star couple: William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Seventh in a series of occasional stories. Mark Mayer calls them "the hard times," the weeks and months when his teenage daughter would simply disappear for days on end. "I wouldn't sleep at night," he remembers. "I just didn't think she was in the right place. " Mayer has spent most of his adult life entertaining kids as a toy designer for Mattel. But raising them was an entirely different matter as he found out when his three daughters came to live with him in a two-bedroom apartment in Woodland Hills after his divorce.

SAN JOSE - Nastia Liukin's legs flopped instead of standing straight as she swung around the uneven bars as if a strong gust of wind had blown through HP Pavilion. As the crowd was still gasping at that mistake, Liukin landed on her backside instead of her feet and in the first 10 minutes of the U.S. Olympic trials, Liukin's attempt at making her second Olympic team seemed over Friday night. Jordyn Wieber, a 16-year-old from DeWitt, Mich., put herself firmly in first place after the first of two nights of the U.S. Olympic trials.

LONDON - It was early Friday night here, and neither Don Porter nor Jessica Mendoza was in a good place. Limos were gathering the VIPs from the VIP hotels along Park Lane. Soon, the opening ceremony of the London Olympics would begin. They were to be, as all Olympic openings have become, an artistic springboard to an athletic extravaganza. Porter sat in an empty lounge alcove of the Grosvenor House Hotel and watched the hustle and bustle of departing dignitaries. He attended his first Games in 1968 in Mexico City, and with the exception of the U.S.-boycotted Moscow Games and the Munich Games in 1972, he had been to every Olympic Summer opener since 1976 in Montreal.