e = "\xd0\xb0 \u2013 \xd1\x83"
print e.encode('iso-8859-1')

>>> e = "\xd0\xb0 \u2013 \xd1\x83"
>>> e = e.replace('\u2013', '')
>>> e
'\xd0\xb0  \xd1\x83'
>>>

import urllib2, lxml.html
url = 'http://sport.mail.ru/news/olympics/13803168/'
f = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
doc = lxml.html.document_fromstring(f)
q = doc.find_class('js-newstext text')[0]
s = q.text_content()
e = s[1560:1580]

In [11]: e
Out[11]: u'\xb1\xd1\x80\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbd\xd0\xb7\xd0\xb0 \u2013 \xd1\x83\xa0\xd1\x80\xd0'
In [12]: e.encode('iso-8859-1')
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeEncodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
/home/spirit/<ipython console> in <module>()
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 12: ordinal not in range(256)
In [13]: e.replace('\u2013','')
Out[13]: u'\xb1\xd1\x80\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbd\xd0\xb7\xd0\xb0 \u2013 \xd1\x83\xa0\xd1\x80\xd0'
In [14]: e = s[1558:1580]
In [15]: print e[:14].encode('iso-8859-1')
 бронза

>>> su=u'12й34\u201356'
>>>
>>> print su
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\cp866.py", line 12, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_map)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position
 5: character maps to <undefined>
>>>
>>> print su.encode('latin', 'ignore')
123456
>>> print su.encode('latin', 'replace')
12?34?56
>>>

import urllib2
import lxml.html
url = 'http://sport.mail.ru/news/olympics/13803168/'
f = urllib2.urlopen(url).read().decode('utf8')
doc = lxml.html.document_fromstring(f)
q = doc.find_class('js-newstext text')[0]
s = q.text_content()
e = s[1560:1580]
print e

>>> e = u'\xb1\xd1\x80\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbd\xd0\xb7\xd0\xb0 \u2013 \xd1\x83\xa0\xd1\x80\xd0'
>>> e
u'\xb1\xd1\x80\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbd\xd0\xb7\xd0\xb0 \u2013 \xd1\x83\xa0\xd1\x80\xd0'
>>> e.replace('\u2013', '')
u'\xb1\xd1\x80\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbd\xd0\xb7\xd0\xb0 \u2013 \xd1\x83\xa0\xd1\x80\xd0'
>>> e.replace(u'\u2013', u'')
u'\xb1\xd1\x80\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbd\xd0\xb7\xd0\xb0  \xd1\x83\xa0\xd1\x80\xd0'
>>>

>>> import urllib2
>>> data = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.yandex.ru')
>>> data.headers.getheader('content-type')
'text/html; charset=UTF-8'
>>>