Eastern Europe

The International Mixed Martial Arts Federation (IMMAF) has awarded hosting rights for its 2017 European Open Championships to the Bulgarian capital of Sofia as it unveiled calendar plans for next year that will involve its first major event in Asia.

Hungary’s supreme court has rejected the latest effort to hold a national referendum on Budapest’s bid to host the 2024 summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Latvia has become the first nation to announce a boycott of Sochi’s 2017 Bob & Skeleton World Championships, as senior Russian officials continue to rail against the findings of the second part of the independent World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report into doping in Russian sport.

Budapest 2024 has today (Wednesday) hailed the abandonment of a proposed citywide referendum on its bid for the summer Olympic and Paralympic Games saying the move proves the proposal was a “damp squib”.

The calendar for motorcycling’s 2016-17 Endurance World Championship (EWC) has been revised with a new event in Slovakia being added to replace a previously scheduled race in Portugal.

The TCR International Series has added four new races to its calendar for the 2017 season, with Georgia set to stage a major motorsport event for the first time.

Where the 2015 European Games in Baku were extravagant, the 2019 edition in Minsk plans to be frugal. Dominic Bliss asks whether the Belarussian capital can deliver the EOC’s flagship event on a shoestring.

Alisher Usmanov has been re-elected as president of the International Fencing Federation (FIE), while the global governing body has also assigned hosting rights to its 2018 Cadet and Junior World Championships and 2019 Senior World Championships.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has stripped a further batch of medals from athletes caught doping at the 2008 and 2012 summer Olympic Games, with Kazakh weightlifting superstar Ilya Ilyin among those sanctioned.

The Ski Association of Slovenia (SZS) will return to the bidding table for the Nordic Ski World Championships after three consecutive failed efforts for the biannual event.

The role of the Hungarian Olympic Committee will remain unchanged in relation to Budapest’s bid to host the 2024 summer Olympic Games despite sweeping reforms of the country’s sports administration structure.

Belarus is planning a scaled-back approach to its staging of the 2019 European Games, according to a government official.

An internal investigation by Uefa, football’s European administrative body, has found that former general secretary Gianni Infantino and current president Aleksander Ceferin did not break any rules when a €4m ($4.4m) loan was handed to the sport’s governing organisation in Slovenia in June 2015.

Euroleague Basketball has announced that the 2017 edition of its Final Four end-of-season showpiece will take place in Belgrade, marking the first time the Serbian capital will host the contest.

The European Olympic Committees (EOC) has today (Friday) chosen Minsk as the new host of the second edition of its European Games multi-sport event in 2019.

Minsk in Belarus has emerged as a leading contender to host the 2019 European Games multi-sport event.