Serena, Venus Williams not on Fed Cup roster
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Serena and Venus Williams are not part of the Fed Cup roster submitted by U.S. captain Mary Joe Fernandez for a World Group playoff against France on April 19-20.
Instead, Fernandez’s roster announced Wednesday includes 18th-ranked Sloane Stephens, No. 42 Madison Keys, No. 49 Varvara Lepchenko and No. 57 Christina McHale.
After losing at a tournament at Charleston, S.C., on April 1, top-ranked Serena Williams said: “I’m really just dead. I need some weeks off where I don’t think about tennis and kind of regroup.”
Venus Williams is ranked 32nd.
The matches will be played on the campus of Saint Louis University. The winning nation will enter the World Group in 2015 and compete for the Fed Cup title. The loser will drop down to World Group II.
Soccer player guilty of anti-gay gesture
BRIGHTON, England — A British court has found Turkish forward Colin Kazim-Richards guilty of making an anti-gay gesture at a match while playing for Blackburn.
The 27-year-old claimed he was bantering with the crowd at his former club Brighton when he made the gesture during the second-tier match in February 2013.
Magistrate Darren Reynolds, sitting at Brighton Magistrates’ Court, says “these gestures were insulting.”
Kazim-Richards, who currently plays for the Turkish club Bursaspor, was fined $1,256, ordered to pay $1,038 of court costs and a $126 victim surcharge.
Fans of the second-tier English club Brighton last year published a dossier highlighting the constant anti-gay abuse they face at matches.
Bayern, Atletico reach Champions League semifinals
MUNICH — Defending champion Bayern Munich came from behind to reach its third straight Champions League semifinal, getting second-half goals from Mario Mandzukic, Thomas Mueller and Arjen Robben to beat Manchester United 3-1 Wednesday night and advance on 4-2 aggregate.
In the day’s other game, Koke’s fifth-minute goal led Atletico Madrid over visiting Barcelona 1-0 for a 2-1 aggregate win. Atletico, which leads Barcelona by one point in the Spanish league, reached the last four of Europe’s top club competition for the first time since 1974.
The draw for the semifinals will take place Friday.
IOC formally disqualifies two Sochi athletes
BELEK, Turkey — The IOC has formally disqualified an Austrian cross-country skier and Polish bobsledder who failed doping tests during the Sochi Olympics.
Both cases had been already announced by the Austrian and Polish Olympic committees.
The International Olympic Committee said Wednesday that Austria’s Johannes Duerr was sanctioned after testing positive for EPO. He was stripped of his eighth-place finish in the men’s skiathlon.
Duerr was tested in Austria, where he had returned for training after competing on Feb. 9. He was sent home hours before he was due to compete in the 50-kilometer mass start race.
Poland’s Daniel Zalewski tested positive on Feb. 22 for a banned substance. The IOC says he and his teammates were disqualified from their 27th-place finish in the four-man bob.
A total of seven positive cases have been reported from Sochi.
By wire sources