Ronaldo has said that he will not renew his contract with AC Milan until he is ready to playt football. A lot of speculation has been placed on the Italian Club but it is now Ronaldo who does not want to commit to AC Milan until he knows he can play.

“My contract with Milan ends in June and then I will be a free player,” he told local program Fantástico. “But I do not want to negotiate with a club without knowing my real condition.”

“Then, when I am fine and ready to play, I will choose my path, which is already set in my mind.”

It is said that the club will be Flamengo has Ronaldo would like to end his career with the club he has supported since childhood.

“I am 1.84 metres tall and today weigh 95 kilos,” said Ronaldo.

“In the 2002 World Cup, I weighed 87 kilos and that is what I’m trying to get back to. That’s the weight I need to reach if I’m going to get back to my best.”

Ronaldo ruptured a tendon in his left knee during a Serie A game against Livorno in February and is expected to need at least another seven months to recover.

The injury was similar to two injuries to his right knee earlier in his career.

“I had to stay in bed for a month,” he said. “I am starting to use an exercise bike, I’m swimming a lot and using up more calories than I’m taking in.”

“…I think I will be close to the ideal weight in a month.”

He added: “I’m not a physiotherapist but I know what I have to do.

“My first recovery took one and a half years. I feel this time it will take much less and I think I will be back in half the time.”

“Milan is available for him, if he will want to cure himself, we shall do what is possible to recover him, but surely we will have to be sure of his recovery to renew his contract,” said Ancelotti

Ronaldo had a terrible start to the season and suffered a serious knee injury ending his season early. Milan are now worried that a repeat could cost the club a lot of money so they want to be sure that Ronaldo is fit before renewing his contract.

Earlier this week Ronaldo was concerned that the scandal could have cost him another contract with Milan but it seems that his fitness will determine his future.

“Ronaldo is an incredible player; the things that happen in his personal life are his own problem,” said Maradona, a man not exactly famed for enjoying the quiet side of life himself.

“He will always be great. Nobody can judge his personal life.”

Ronaldo has always been a great admirer of Maradona and it is good to see the respect is mutual.

After hearing testimony from the two transvestites for nearly four hours, police commissioner Carlos Augusto Nogueira, who is in charge of the case, said both “confessed to having lied on everything they said so far.”

“There were no drugs or sex between them that night. They said they made it up because they did not get the money they wanted in their attempted extortion,” the police official said.

Nogueira interrogated transvestite Andre Luiz Albertino, known as “Andreia Albertine,” who filed suit against Ronaldo on April 28, and another transvestite involved in the incident, identified as “Carla Tamine”. The two work as prostitutes.

“Their attitude today (Tuesday) surprised us,” Nogueira said.

“They said they saw an opportunity to get out of that life (of prostitution).”

He explained that both transvestites showed up at the police station of their own accord in order to correct their initial statements.

“They showed that they were really repentant,” Nogueira said.

Ronaldo has said that, as he left a nightclub, he decided to go to an hourly hotel with a prostitute, not knowing that he was in fact taking with him the transvestite known as “Andreia Albertine.”

He added that two other prostitutes joined them at the hotel, but he said that - contrary to what “Andreia” had told the media - that there were no drugs and no intimate relations. Ronaldo insisted that he was just the victim of an extortion.

“I did not have sex because when I realised it was not what I was looking for I took my team off the pitch. I never took drugs, I am still a sportsman even if I am injured,” the striker said in a TV interview.

Ronaldo added that the scandal led to the end of his more than year-long relationship with engineer Maria Beatriz Anthony, 23, but he noted he still hopes they may get back together.

Besides his girlfriend, the striker has made it clear that he thinks the scandal has cost him any chance of extending his contract with Milan, set to expire next month.

And it may also cost him lucrative sponsorship deals with various firms, including Nike, that provide most of the 32 million US dollars that constitute his annual income.

Ronaldo admitted that he only has himself to blame for his current troubles.

“It was a tragic moment in which I made the worst decision of my personal life,” he said. “I am more than repentant, I am ashamed.”

UNICEF stated in a statement through its web page in Brazil that it is Ronaldo’s “mistake” to link his name with UNICEF.

“UNICEF explains that Ronaldo Nazario de Lima is not ambassador of The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, and he does not have any link with that agency,” stated the statement.

The “mistake” was made by Ronaldo himself when he mentioned his position as “UNICEF ambassador” in an interview broadcasted Sunday night by Globo television network.

In that television interview, Ronaldo made his first public mention of a sex scandal involving him and cross-dressing male prostitutes.

Ronaldo said he “regrets the incident” and is “ashamed by his stupid action” but denied the incident could damage his work as “UNICEF ambassador.”

“It does not have anything to do with my professional life as an athlete. It does not interfere with my position as UNICEF ambassador. Nothing is going to affect that,” said Ronaldo.

Ronaldo confused his position “as ambassador” with another organization linked to the United Nations (UN), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), of which he is “ambassador” together with Zinedine Zidane and Didier Drogba.

The only soccer player that is a UNICEF ambassador is English native David Beckham.

”I reiterate that no contracts have been broken by sponsors and none will be broken, as I said before,” Ronaldo’s agent Fabiano Farah explained.

Fitness

Ronaldo is nearly able to move his knee 100%. He continues to lift weights to strengthen his leg, working 3 times a week under the supervision of Bruno Mazziotti.

It’s time someone showed a little compassion for Ronaldo.

Whenever a superstar of his magnitude implodes — as he most certainly did in his recent run-in with three transvestites in Rio de Janeiro — the delight in exposing such personal fallibility extends far beyond the trashy tabloids or talking heads on lowbrow television.

There is almost glee in the media coverage. The titillation factor too comes into play in Ronaldo’s calamitous fall from grace. A night out at a bar and disco, the invitation to three prostitutes to accompany him to a nearby motel, the humiliating but sadly belated discovery that they were, in fact, men and not women, all add up to prime tabloid fodder.

Throw in the fact that Ronaldo — three-time FIFA world player of the year, two-time World Cup winner and United Nations goodwill ambassador — offered to pay the unsavory trio just to leave and be done with it, and the fact that one of the three allegedly tried to extort more money by threatening to reveal all to the media, and you have all the makings of a steamy Brazilian soap opera.

This is not what Ronaldo had in mind when he returned to Rio to recuperate after knee surgery had prematurely ended his season with AC Milan.

But the injury, combined with the fact that he will turn 32 in September and that the best days of his career are very much behind him, have served to leave Ronaldo more than a little downcast.

His depressed state of mind was made worse, apparently, by an argument with his girlfriend that led him to stomp — perhaps limp might be a better verb, given the state of his knee — to a nightclub in search of solace.

Instead, it led to worldwide snickering and ridicule.

To his credit, he is facing up to the fact that this is one stain on his reputation that no amount of scrubbing will remove. It has nothing to do with his soccer abilities but everything to do with his character.

He could win three more World Cups, but there will always be those who will ask, “Wasn’t he the guy who . . . ?” But Ronaldo is not the first, and certainly will not be the last, to run afoul of prostitutes. There currently are world-class players on world-class teams whose personal lives are anything but salutary.

On Sunday night, Ronaldo tried valiantly to repair some of the damage and he agreed to an interview with Globo television in Brazil and was candid almost to a fault.

“I’ve done something really stupid in my personal life,” he said. “We are all subject to making mistakes and I made a mistake in looking for this. I did not at any moment know they were transvestites.

“I cried a lot afterward. I was incredibly ashamed.”

That is about as honest an answer as you can get.

“It took on a very big dimension and had worldwide repercussion,” he said. “It will stain my personal life forever. For the sensationalist media, this has had a bigger impact than the World Cup.”

The best of scriptwriters could not have matched what actually happened in that motel lobby.

“I did not know they were transvestites, I’m completely heterosexual,” Ronaldo told Globo. “When we got to the place, I concluded that they were transvestites.”

Facing his girlfriend when he eventually arrived home must have made it an exceptionally long night for Ronaldo. For now, Ronaldo will continue his recuperation. His contract with AC Milan ends next month. The Italian club is unlikely to make him a new offer. Flamengo of Brazil is interested in signing him.

The years will pass. The incident will be gather dust and eventually be supplanted by some other scandal involving some other athlete. Ronaldo has scaled the heights and plumbed the depths. He is guilty of nothing but bad judgment. A bit of compassion would not come amiss.

“Behind the personality which I carry, I’m a normal person and I have my weaknesses and my fears,” he said. “I have to reconstruct everything. It’s like a house which has been knocked down by a hurricane. Now I have to build it all over again.”

-Source By Grahame L. Jones, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Maria Beatriz Antony, who had been dating the player for a year, was staying in his apartment in the Barra da Tijuca district, Rio’s west zone, when she acknowledged that Ronaldo had spent Sunday evening in the company of three transvestites.

According to the press, the player himself gave his fiancee the bad news. Antony moved to her parents’ home in Brasilia on Monday.

The scandal exploded when Andrea Albertino, one of the three transvestites, told the police that Ronaldo had refused to pay for her services after acknowledging she was not a woman.

The Milan forward, who is currently in Rio on a leave following a knee surgery, admitted to the police that he had gone out with Albertino and her friends because he thought they were female prostitutes. In his testimony, he explained that he needed to “have fun and relax” with “people from outside his circle.”

Ronaldo also said that Albertino tried to extort 50,000 reais (29,900 U.S. dollars) from him in exchange for not calling the police or the press, which was confirmed by one of the other two prostitutes.

On Tuesday, Albertino was interviewed by newspapers and networks in Brazil. While waiting for another participation in a TV show in Sao Paulo, the prostitute, whose ID name is Andre Luis Albertino, got involved in another event that led her to show up at a police precinct for the second time in two days.

She was charged with damaging some equipment of Brazilian broadcaster Rede TV, after reacting violently to questions made by a comedian that hosts a show on that TV channel.

Ronaldo is still in Rio and hopes to return to football before the end of the year. At this rate it looks promising but Ronaldo does not want to rush into anything until he is able to kick a football and run on the pitch without any pain.