(LOS ANGELES) — Homeland Security Investigations has seized nearly $100 million in fake goods, including counterfeit Super Bowl merchandise, ahead of Sunday’s big game, a top HSI official told reporters on Thursday.
HSI is the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative arm.
Steve Francis, who serves as the agency’s executive associate director, said at a press conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center that stealing intellectual property is not a “victimless crime.”
“The illicit proceeds resulting from the sale of counterfeit or unlicensed products are more often than not funneled back to smart other criminal organizations,” Francis said. “But more importantly, the illegal manufacture and sale of these counterfeit goods represent predatory trade practices that endanger the public health and economy and restrict competitiveness of the United States products in the global market.”
“Millions” of dollars of merchandise from 261 vendors have already been seized leading up to the game, according to Lt. Geoff Deedrick with the LA County Sheriff’s Department.
Deedrick told consumers to be alert about counterfeit goods — look for official NFL holograms on the products and if it’s too good to be true than it is.
Pete Flores, the executive assistant commissioner at U.S. Customers and Border Protection, told ABC News that not only are counterfeit goods dangerous for national security but could cause bodily harm. He said the consumer doesn’t know what the product is made of and where the product is coming from,
Flores said there isn’t one particular place where it is coming from.
“It comes from multiple countries,” he said. “So multiple importers, it comes from all over the world. So it’s it’s an issue and it’s not only arriving here, it’s a no by sea by air by land. It’s coming across in different modes of transportation.”
(BEIJING) — Russian star figure skater Kamila Valieva tested positive for a banned substance during December’s Russian Figure Skating Championships, the International Testing Agency confirmed Friday, as rumors of her positive tests swirled in reports for days. However, a decision on her competing in the women’s individual event at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing will now go to an appeal hearing.
Valieva was a heavy favorite in the women’s event after scoring a record-high total in the team competition.
A World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accredited lab found Valieva tested positive for trimetazidine, a heart medication, in a sample taken on Dec. 25, 2021, by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, known as RUSADA. RUSADA was notified of the positive result Feb. 8, at which time Valieva was provisionally suspended. The sample was collected by RUSADA, not the ITA, according to the agency, and not under the direct jurisdiction of the International Olympic Committee and thus her identity was not revealed.
The ITA was informed of the positive test on Feb. 8, after the team event was wrapped up with the Russian Olympic Committee winning gold.
The testing agency said it does not typically reveal the name of minors — Valieva is just 15 years old — but did so due to “the necessity for official information due to heightened public interest.”
The suspension prohibited her from competing further in the Beijing Games, and thus the individual event, however, Valieva appealed the suspension and RUSADA cleared her to compete on Feb. 9.
The ROC confirmed the chain of events and named Valieva in a statement Friday, saying the committee “considers it necessary to provide detailed explanations on the current situation.”
“The doping test of the Athlete who gave a positive result does not apply to the period of the Olympic Games,” the ROC said. “At the same time, the Athlete repeatedly passed doping tests before and after December 25, 2021, including already in Beijing during the figure skating tournament. All results are negative.”
However, the IOC is now challenging RUSADA’s decision, according to the ITA, and the IOC said a rushed decision from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) will take place before the women’s event.
“The IOC will exercise its right to appeal and not to wait for the reasoned decision by RUSADA, because a decision is needed before the next competition the athlete is due to take part in (Women Single Skating, 15 February 2022),” the ITA said in a statement Friday.
The International Skating Union (ISU) later released a statement saying it “will exercise its right to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport the decision of the RUSADA Disciplinary Anti Doping Committee of February 9 to lift the provisional suspension and to ask CAS to reinstate the provisional suspension.”
The WADA also confirmed in a statement that it “intends to lodge an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in relation to the anti-doping case involving a Russian Olympic Committee figure skater who tested positive for a prohibited substance in an event prior to the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.”
“Under the terms of the World Anti-Doping Code (Code), WADA has a right to appeal the decision to lift the provisional suspension before CAS and does so on the grounds that the Code has not been correctly applied in this case,” the agency added.
The ROC noted in its statement that Valieva currently “has the right to train and take part in competitions in full without restrictions until the Court of Arbitration for Sport decides otherwise regarding her status in relation to the Olympic Games.”
“In any case, on the merits of a possible anti-doping violation, a disciplinary investigation will be conducted by RAA RUSADA in accordance with the applicable rules in the prescribed manner,” the ROC said. “Given that the Athlete’s positive doping test was not taken during the Olympic Games, the Athlete’s results and team competition results during the Olympic Games are not subject to automatic review. In addition, the Russian Olympic Committee draws attention to the fact that the Athlete’s doping test, taken after the European Figure Skating Championships in January 2022, as well as her doping test taken during the Olympic Games, gave a negative result.”
“The Russian Olympic Committee is taking comprehensive measures to protect the rights and interests of the members of the ROC Team, and to keep the honestly won Olympic gold medal,” the committee added. “The Russian Figure Skating Federation has no doubts about the honesty and purity of its Athlete, will make every effort to clarify the circumstances of the incident and provide the Athlete with the necessary comprehensive assistance and support.”
The reports began to grow in intensity after the medal ceremony for Russia’s gold medal-winning team, helmed by Valieva, was delayed. The ITA said Friday that a decision on whether the ROC will be able to keep its medals after the full appeal process for Valieva takes place, which will come once an analysis of her B sample is completed.
The figure skating team event medal ceremony was delayed due to what the IOC described as “legal issues.”
The medal ceremony was scheduled for Tuesday, before it was postponed. The athletes still have not received their medals.
Russia won gold in the team event, while the United States and Japan won silver and bronze, respectively.
Russian news outlets reported that Valieva tested positive for a banned drug before the Olympics, resulting in the ceremony being postponed. Russian newspapers RBC and Kommersant reported that Valieva tested positive for trimetazidine, a medication used to treat chest pain.
Valieva made history in the event when she became the first woman to land a quadruple jump at the Winter Olympics. She won the women’s portion of the team event, earning the ROC 10 points.
“I am glad that I was able to do the quad Salchow, quad toe and the triple Axel,” she said, according to the ISU. “Only the second quad toe did not happen, but I’ll work on that.”
The young skater is scheduled to compete again in the women’s singles event next week.
Valieva is the only minor on the ROC team who participated in the team event.
Russian athlete are competing under the name “Russian Olympic Committee” due to an ongoing ban against Russia participating in the games due to its previous doping violations. This is the second Olympics in a row that Russia has been banned from.
The WADA banned the country from all international sporting events because of its doping violations.
The agency allowed athletes who could prove they are clean and unconnected to the cover-up to compete.
(BEIJING) — Mikaela Shiffrin came up empty-handed in her third competition after shockingly wiping out in her first two races, both of which she was expected to contend for the gold.
Shiffrin finished ninth in the super-G, with Switzerland’s Lara Gut-Behrami winning gold, her second medal of the Games. The event is not one of Shiffrin’s best, but she is expected to be a contender again in the Alpine combined in a week.
Two days earlier, Shiffrin had shockingly busted out of the competition just seconds into the first run of the slalom. Shiffrin missed the fourth gate in her run, the event where she won her first Olympic gold in 2014.
The skier, who was expected to challenge for several medals in Beijing, sat on the side of the hill, with her head in her hands, for 20 minutes after the stunning accident.
The 26-year-old also fell during her first run in the giant slalom on Monday, disqualifying her from the event.
“Could blame it on a lot of things…and we’ll analyze it till the cows come home, but not today,” Shiffrin said on Instagram following that crash. “Today I chalk it up to really awful timing of a really frustrating mistake. Moving focus to slalom now, AND cheering for my teammates in the second run of the GS and the DH!”
Sweden’s Sara Hector took the gold with a time of 1:55:68, followed by Italy’s Federica Brignone with a time of 1:55.97 and Gut-Behrami with a time of 1:56:41.
Shiffrin is one medal away from tying the record for most Olympic medals by a female American Alpine skier, four. She is two gold medals away from holding the record for most golds ever by a female Alpine skier, also four.
Shiffrin aims to have many chances to attempt those feats during the games as she plans on competing in three other Alpine events over the next two weeks.
She is still expected to compete in the downhill on Valentine’s Day and the combined on Feb. 17. She also said on Thursday she may compete in the team event, which she had not planned to enter coming into the Games.
Shiffrin, a Colorado native, has been competing since she was 16 and quickly became one of the sport’s all-time greatest skiers with her record-setting performances. She is the most decorated Alpine skier in the world circuit having won 11 World Championship medals, six gold.
At 18 years old she became the youngest slalom champion when she won a gold medal in the 2014 Sochi Games. Shiffrin won a gold medal in the giant slalom competition and a silver medal in the combined competition during the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.
(BEIJING) — Legendary snowboarder Shaun White came up short in his bid to win his fourth overall and second straight gold medal in the halfpipe. He settled for fourth place in what he said will be his fifth and final Olympics.
Japan’s Ayumu Hirano won the gold, while Australian Scotty James earned silver and Switzerland’s Jan Scherrer took bronze.
The final results looked like they would be filled with controversy until the last run by Hirano.
Hirano landed a picture-perfect triple cork 1440 in his second run, a trick that no one has ever landed in a clean competition run, as well as two double-cork 1440s and two 1260s — but it was not rewarded by the judges. He scored just a 91.75, placing him second behind James, who was rewarded for his big switch rotations.
However, the Japanese snowboarder came back with the same run in his third and final attempt, and scored a 96.00 to launch him into first place. James finished in second with a 92.50 and Scherrer had a 87.25.
The other Americans in the final, Taylor Gold and Chase Josey, finished fifth and seventh, respectively.
White put down a full run in his first attempt, but was a bit sketchy on one landing. He cleaned it up in his second run to put down an 85.00. But sitting in fourth, just two hits into his final competition run, he clipped the deck and slid into the bottom of the pipe. White got a round of applause from his competitors as he walked to the back with some tears in his eyes.
The 35-year-old White was attempting to become the first Winter Olympian to win four gold medals in the same individual event. He won gold in Torino in 2006, Vancouver in 2010 and Pyeongchang in 2018. He also finished fourth in 2014.
“To be atop a sport like this for this long, I feel so honored to be doing that,” White told “Good Morning America” in January. “And it’s so wild because when I look around, everybody in the area are all people I used to compete with, you know, they’re coaches now.”
White teased that he had been working on new moves to compete with some of the younger athletes in Beijing, including Japan’s Ayumu Hirano and Ruka Hirano, who have both landed triple corks — triple-twisting off-axis rotations one step up from the double corks that have become commonplace for the top snowboarders. But Ayumu Hirano, despite landing the triple cork in two previous competitions, had not been able to win the events due to mistakes on other tricks.
“There’s talks of doing a 16[20], which is 180 [degrees] past the 1440,” White told “GMA,” referring to quadruple-rotation trick he landed in his 2018 gold medal run. “But it’s gonna be incredible. I don’t want to give anything away, but working on some new moves and I’m hoping that everything really peaks once I get to the competition.”
Even White’s appearance in Beijing was no certainty just weeks ago. He mostly took off from competing on the world stage since Pyeongchang, saving his aging body for one more run at the Olympics. But he tested positive for COVID-19 in December only to narrowly be cleared to compete at the last U.S. Olympic trials qualifier in early January.
He struggled at that event at Mammoth Mountain, however, and pulled out of the final due to the lingering effects of COVID-19. He rebounded in Laax, Switzerland, with a third-place finish in a world cup event on Jan. 15 — his final competition before Beijing. The finish in Laax locked up an automatic qualifying spot, though the U.S. team could have still chosen him as its one discretionary pick.
White did not compete at last month’s X Games, won by New Zealand’s James.
Gold, Josey and Lucas Foster were the other Americans in the men’s halfpipe competition. Foster was the only one making his Olympic debut, and the only one to miss the final.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Thursday’s sports events:
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
Memphis 132, Detroit 107
Miami 112, New Orleans 97
Washington 113, Brooklyn 112
Toronto 139, Houston 120
Dallas 112, LA Clippers 105
Phoenix 131, Milwaukee 107
New York 116, Golden State 114
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE
Pittsburgh 2, Ottawa 0
Columbus 4, Buffalo 3 (OT)
Washington 5, Montreal 2
Carolina 6, Boston 0
New Jersey 7, St. Louis 4
Calgary 5, Toronto 2
Colorado 3, Tampa Bay 2
TOP-25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL
Gonzaga 89, Pacific 51
Michigan 82, Purdue 58
Arizona 72, Washington St. 60
Duke 82, Clemson 64
Saint Mary’s (Cal.) 86, San Diego 57
Murray St. 73, Tennessee St. 62
(LOS ANGELES) — Not all the Super Bowl action on Sunday will be on the field at Sofi Stadium — it might be outside in the search for bombs and suspicious packages.
More than 30 bomb-sniffing dogs from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) K-9 unit — come to Los Angeles from as far as Savannah, Georgia.
“ATF K-9 Division is out here with K-9 from all over the country, making sure that this is one of the safest cities in America,” Ginger Colbrun, an ATF spokeswoman told ABC News. “We are making sure that any bags that are left are taken care of and they don’t have any explosives or firearms or ammunition in them.”
ABC News watched a demonstration of ATF dogs sniffing backpacks outside of the Super Bowl Experience, an interactive three-day event at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
ATF’s bomb-sniffing dogs work other large-scale events as well, including various pro sports all-star games, and the G-9 summit, Colburn said.
“These dogs work on a food reward basis, so every time they smell an explosive, they receive food and so they train all day, all week, all year,” she explained.
Belle, Wolfgang and Jerry — three of the ATF bomb sniffing dogs that ABC News watched train — are part of the 12 K-9 teams from around the U.S. at the Super Bowl.
Overall, ATF has more than 80 people in Los Angeles at various locations around the city.
Alex Guerrero, a career bomb technician with ATF said that if the dog does get a hit on a suspicious package, it’s trained to sit right by it.
“We do quite a bit of training and this is what this is, what we train for,” Guerrero, who is based in Houston, Texas, said. “We’re all trained well and have great equipment to do our job.”
(NEW YORK) — When tennis star Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open in May 2021 to protect her mental health, the move shook the tennis world and put mental health in the spotlight.
As Osaka, then 23 and the No. 2 player in the world, walked away from the Grand Slam event at the top of her game, she shared her struggles with depression and anxiety with her fans. The move was unprecedented in the sport and deeply relatable for many.
“The truth is that I have suffered long bouts of depression since the US Open in 2018 and I have had a really hard time coping with that,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.
“I think now the best thing for the tournament, the other players and my well-being is that I withdraw so that everyone can get back to focusing on the tennis going on in Paris,” Osaka wrote. “I never wanted to be a distraction and I accept that my timing was not ideal and my message could have been clearer. More importantly I would never trivialize mental health or use the term lightly.”
Osaka, who has returned to tennis competition, most recently competing in the Australian Open, is now reflecting on that moment and why she chose to speak about her mental health.
“It was important to me to be public because … I think it gives me clarity,” Osaka, 24, said in an interview with Good Morning America. “Just saying out loud that I’ll take a break and I’ll come back when I am truly in love with the sport and I know what I want to do here; it gave me time to reset myself.”
Journaling has become a regular part of her self-care routine, she said.
“Lately, I’ve been writing in my journal, and I think that that keeps my thoughts in order,” she said. “I feel like it gives me clarity on what I want to do and what I want to accomplish.”
Osaka said her ambitions extend beyond the court to being an entrepreneur and the founder of KINLÒ, a beauty brand designed for melanin-rich skin. The company launched in September 2021 with natural skin care products and sunscreen.
“KINLÒ was made for people with melanated skin,” she said. “Because we found that there wasn’t that many sunscreen products available for them.”
Osaka said she hopes through KINLÒ she can bring awareness that skin cancer affects people of all skin tones and help everyone embrace their beauty and health inside and out. Her idea of beauty centers on celebrating our individuality with our skincare needs and rituals.
“I think to me, beauty is a uniqueness,” she said. “Just embracing your uniqueness and your individuality is what makes you beautiful to me.”
(BEIJING) — Nathan Chen has his Olympic gold medal.
The 22-year-old took the win in the men’s singles event, rebounding from his disappointing 2018 Pyeongchang performance for a triumphant comeback.
The reigning world champion scored a 218.63 in his free skate and 332.60 overall.
Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama stumbled on a quad loop, eliminating any chance of winning, but did hold on for silver. Fellow Japanese skater Shoma Uno had a stumble of his own, on a quad flip, but earned bronze.
Yuzuru Hanyu, the two-time defending gold medalist, shockingly bailed on his first quad jump in the short program and managed to only place eighth heading into the free skate. Hanyu went for a quad axel in his free skate, which has never been landed in competition, but fell to the ice. Still, he jumped up to fourth in the final standings with a strong free skate.
Fellow Team USA member Jason Brown came into the free skate placing sixth in the individual short program. Brown, the first to take the ice in the final group, held onto that spot in the final standings.
Chen led coming into the free skate program following a world record-setting short program, with a score of 113.97 points that easily topped Japanese skaters Kagiyama (108.12) and Uno (105.90).
Earlier this week, Team USA took home silver in the team figure skating competition, behind the Russian Olympic Committee.
Teammate Vincent Zhou — who helped the team secure the silver medal with his free skating performance — had to withdraw from the individual competition after testing positive for COVID-19.
Chen was seen as a clear gold medal contender at the Beijing Olympics after a poor short program cost him a medal four years ago.
At the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, Chen earned bronze in the team event though failed to make the podium in singles, finishing fifth overall. But he still managed to make history there, becoming the first skater to land six quadruple jumps in a single program while also earning the highest free skate score ever in an Olympic competition.
Chen came to Beijing after winning his sixth straight national figure skating championship — a feat last accomplished by Dick Button, winner of seven consecutive U.S. titles in the 1940s and ’50s.
The three-time world champion took time off from Yale University to train for the 2022 Olympics and plans to return to the school in the fall to study statistics and data science.
(BEIJING) — American snowboarding queen Chloe Kim was crowned with gold for the second straight Olympics.
The 21-year-old took first place in women’s halfpipe, followed by Spain’s Queralt Castellet, who claimed silver, and Japan’s Sena Tomita, who took home the bronze.
It took just one run for Kim to post a 94.00, the eventual winning score, despite a best-of-three runs format. Kim took a victory lap in her third run as the final competitor. She attempted to land the first 1260 for a woman in competition in her second and third runs, but couldn’t nail it.
Kim’s winning run included two 1080s as well as a switch 900. In the end, it was far above her second-closest competitor.
Among those rooting on Kim from the bottom of the halfpipe was Eileen Gu, the San Francisco-born freestyle skier competing for China, who won gold in the women’s big air event earlier this week. Gu is a favorite in the women’s ski halfpipe as well.
Kim was the only American in the final, as the other three competitors couldn’t make it through qualifying. Maddie Mastro was expected to compete for the podium with a double-cork maneuver even Kim did not have, but she couldn’t land a clean run in qualifications a night earlier.
Kim won gold despite taking off the better part of two years in 2019 and 2020, as she enrolled at Princeton University. She took a break from school over the past year to focus on training and qualifying for the Beijing Olympics.
She spent most of her time training ahead of the Olympics, as opposed to competing, but she won the only event she entered this world cup season in Laax, Switzerland, last month. She also won in her only Dew Tour event this season, taking first over Castellet at Copper Mountain in mid-December.
Kim won gold in Pyeongchang at just 17 in dominating fashion. She scored a 98.25 in her final run — the only athlete to score higher than 90.
The win at the 2018 Olympics, and her personality, catapulted her to international fame. She appeared in a Nike advertising campaign alongside Serena Williams and Megan Rapinoe, had a Barbie doll released in her image and appeared in the Maroon 5 music video for “Girls Like You” and on the MTV show Ridiculousness.
The Southern California native has long ruled the world snowboarding scene despite her youth. She first competed at the 2014 X Games at just 14 years old, finishing in second place. Kim would’ve been a lock to compete for the U.S. in Sochi in 2014, but the sport’s governing body requires athletes be at least 15 to qualify for the Olympics.
Despite the disappointment of not being able to compete at the 2014 Games, she continued to perform at the highest level. She won a halfpipe competition on the world cup tour just weeks after the Sochi Olympics and won two golds at the Youth Winter Olympic Games in 2016. She came back to the X Games and won gold in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2021. She sat out the X Games in 2020 and 2022.
Kim also won the world championships in 2021 and has finished first in both qualifying and the finals in every competition she’s entered on the world cup tour since February 2018.
(NEW YORK) — Seven-time Olympic medalist Simone Biles, who suffered her own setbacks at last summer’s Tokyo Olympics, is showing support for U.S. skier Mikaela Shiffrin, who on Tuesday suffered her second early exit from a Beijing Olympics competition.
Biles tagged Shiffrin in a tweet Tuesday, posting her handle alongside three white hearts.
Biles, 24, went into the Tokyo Olympics with the pressure of being on track to win an unprecedented six gold medals, with the aim of becoming the first woman since 1968 to win back-to-back titles in the all-around gymnastics competition. Instead, citing mental health struggles, Biles withdrew from the team competition as well as several individual competitions, leaving the 2020 Games with two medals: a silver and a bronze.
“I truly do feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders at times,” Biles wrote on Instagram during the Summer Olympics. “I know I brush it off and make it seem like pressure doesn’t affect me but damn sometimes it’s hard hahaha! The olympics is no joke!”
Like Biles, Shiffrin, 26, entered the Beijing Olympics with the weight of high expectations and the pressure of being an American Olympic star.
The Colorado native and two-time Olympic gold medalist is one medal away from tying the record for most Olympic medals by an American female Alpine skier — four. She is two gold medals away from holding the record for most golds ever by a female Alpine skier — also four.
Shiffrin fell during her first run in the giant slalom Monday, disqualifying her from the event.
On Tuesday, Shiffrin missed the fourth gate in her slalom run, the event where she won her first Olympic gold in 2014.
After the accident, she sat on the side of the hill, with her head in her hands, for minutes.
Prior to the start of the Beijing Olympics, Shiffrin said she had watched how Biles handled her own pressure-cooker environment at the Tokyo Olympics and noted that for some Olympians, the perception is, “It has to be gold or else that’s a huge disappointment.”
On Twitter, Biles also highlighted another aspect of the pressure Olympic athletes face: what happens after a supposed failure.
Biles retweeted a post that read, “I don’t know, shaming people just because they didn’t perform well at the Olympics feels like the opposite of why we supposedly have the Olympics in the first place.”
Shiffrin’s boyfriend, fellow skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who is competing for Norway in Beijing, asked for fans to support Shiffrin. He shared a photo on Instagram of Shiffrin sitting on the snow after her fall in the slalom run.
“When you look at this picture you can make up so many statements, meanings and thoughts. Most of you probably look at it saying: ‘she has lost it’, ‘she can’t handle the pressure’ or ‘what happened?’… Which makes me frustrated, because all I see is a top athlete doing what a top athlete does!,” he wrote. “It’s a part of the game and it happens. The pressure we all put on individuals in the sports are enormous, so let’s give the same amount of support back.. It’s all about the balance and we are just normal human beings!!”
Shiffrin is still expected to compete in the super-G on Thursday, the downhill on Feb. 14 and the combined on Feb. 17.
