BOBSLED
Kaillie Humphries and Lolo Jones of the United States are the leaders at the midway point of the women’s bobsled world championship in Alterbereg, Germany.
Humphries drove to the fastest time in each of the two runs Friday, she and Jones finishing with a combined time of 1 minute, 52.94 seconds. That puts them 0.34 seconds ahead of the German sled driven by Kim Kalicki and pushed by Ann-Christin Strack. Another German sled, driven by Laura Nolte and pushed by Deborah Levi, is third, 0.43 seconds off the lead. The U.S. team of Elana Meyers Taylor and Sylvia Hoffman is fourth, 0.83 seconds back.
The final two runs are Saturday. Humphries is the defending world champion and seeking what would be a record fourth women’s world title. She won on the same Altenberg track last season, with Kalicki second.
The two-man bobsled race starts Saturday. Unlike World Cups, which ordinarily are two-heat events, races at the bobsled and skeleton world championships are four-heat competitions.
The skeleton world championships are next Thursday and Friday, while the four-man race and the women’s monobob race are both Feb. 13 and 14.
SOCCER
UEFA BAN: Ajax goalkeeper André Onana was banned for one year by UEFA in a doping case on Friday and is set to miss next year’s African Cup of Nations in his home nation of Cameroon.
Onana tested positive for furosemide, a banned diuretic often used as a masking agent to hide the presence of other drugs, in a urine sample given last October. After feeling unwell, Onana said he took a pill prescribed for his girlfriend from a packet he mistook for aspirin “because the packaging was almost identical.”
“I just want to clarify that everything was the result of a human mistake,” Onana said in a statement, describing the UEFA ban as “excessive and disproportionate.”
Anti-doping rules make athletes liable for banned substances in their body, though they can argue they were not at fault or negligent.
SKIING
MEN’S WORLD CUP: Dominik Paris won his first race since blowing out his knee a year ago, triumphing Friday in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, in the last men’s World Cup downhill before the word championships.
The Italian skier trailed Beat Feuz by one-tenth of a second midway through his run but excelled on the bottom part of the Kandahar course to beat his Swiss rival by 0.37 seconds. Feuz had won the previous two downhills and leads the discipline standings.
Matthias Mayer was 0.40 behind in third, with Austrian teammate Max Franz two-hundredths further back in fourth.
Paris was the 2013 silver medalist in downhill at the worlds and is the defending super-G champion. He tore ligaments and fractured a bone in his right knee in a crash during downhill training for the Kitzbühel race in January 2020.
His previous best result this season came when he returned to Kitzbühel two weeks ago and finished third.
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