Kye Sun-hu, stepping up one category to the 57kg lightweight slot, dumped Sydney Olympic champion Isabel Fernandez of Spain with a perfect throw to book a semifinal berth against Deborah Gravenstijn of the Netherlands yesterday.
Ri Sang-sim, 23, participating in her first senior international competition, floored another Dutch hopeful, Natascha Van Gurp, with a classic uchimata inside-thigh throw in the women's 52kg featherweight quarter-finals.
Ri was set to battle 29-year-old veteran Cuban Amarilis Savon, who has a collection of silver and bronze world and Olympic medals in the lighter 48kg bantamweight, in the semifinals.
PHOTO: AP
The 25-year-old Kye came out of nowhere to win the bantamweight gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics by beating long-reigning world champion Ryoko Tamura of Japan.
She settled for bronze at the 2000 Sydney Olympics after moving up to the 52kg featherweight class and added the world title to her medal collection at the 2001 championships in Munich.
Japan, with four gold medals halfway through the four-day championships, had another lackluster day with only featherweight Yuki Yokozawa reaching the semi-final stage.
Yokozawa, fifth in Munich, was to face European champion Annabella Euranie of France in the last four round. Reigning featherweight champion Yurisleidis Lupetey of Cuba stopped Noriko Mogi in the quarterfinals South Korea's Lee Won-Hee beat Yusuke Kanamaru, the silver medallist in Munich, with a body drop in the men's 73kg lightweight quarterfinals.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier