Sport Briefs

FootballDublin pub owner Charlie Chawke has emerged as being the man behind a new syndicate interested in buying troubled Championship club Newcastle, the Irishman said in a radio interview on Sunday.Chawke is working with colleagues to put together a group with the financial means to buy Newcastle, up for sale by owner Mike Ashley following relegation from the Premiership.

FootballDublin pub owner Charlie Chawke has emerged as being the man behind a new syndicate interested in buying troubled Championship club Newcastle, the Irishman said in a radio interview on Sunday.Chawke is working with colleagues to put together a group with the financial means to buy Newcastle, up for sale by owner Mike Ashley following relegation from the Premiership.MotoracingThere is no way five-times world rally champion Sebastien Loeb could switch from rallying to Formula One during this rally season, the Frenchman’s Citroen team said yesterday. Previously French newspaper L’Equipe quoted Loeb as saying he had his eye on a possible vacancy at the Torro Rosso team where under-performing F1 pilot Sebastien Bourdais could be deprived of his first-line driver’s seat.BoxingFormer Canadian world IBF and WBC boxing champion Arturo Gatti has been found dead in Porto de Galinhas in Brazil, according to press reports yesterday.A spokesperson for the Brazilian state of Pernambuco confirmed the death without giving further details.Canadian media were reporting that Brazilian police were treating the death of the former boxer as suspicious and had opened an investigation.Italian-born Gatti, 37, grew up in Montreal but spent most of his career in the United States. He retired to Montreal in 2007.CyclingAustria’s disgraced cyclist Bernhard Kohl has implicated other top cyclists, including Thomas Dekker and Pietro Caucchioli, in an ever-widening Austrian doping scandal, the daily Kurier reported yesterday.Kohl, who was banned last year after testing positive for EPO CERA, told Austrian investigators that Dekker and Caucchioli had used blood-doping centrifuges acquired by his former manager Stefan Matschiner between 2006 and 2008, Kurier wrote, based on Kohl’s interrogation transcripts. – Nampa-AFP