■ Golf
Mallon takes ADT trophy
After knocking at the door most of the season, Meg Mallon blew it down at Annika Sorenstan's expense. Sorenstam bogeyed the final hole on Sunday at the LPGA Tour's season-ending ADT Championship, allowing Mallon to walk away with her first title of the year. Playing just in front of Sorenstam, Mallon birdied six of the last 11 holes on one of the LPGA Tour's most trying layouts to tie for the lead at seven-under. Sorenstam then missed a 10-foot par putt at the 18th. "You win some and you lose some," said the Swedish superstar, who finished the season with a tour-best six titles. It was the first win in over a year for Mallon, who had posted nine top-10 finishes without a victory this season before capturing her 15th career title.
■ Games
Vietnam opens its doors
With the kickoff to the Southeast Asian Games just a week away, Vietnam said yesterday it is ready to welcome visitors from the region to the country's first major sporting event. The communist country expects 10,000 foreign visitors, including athletes and officials, during the 22nd games that run from Dec. 5-13. Most of the sporting events will be held in the capital of Hanoi and southern Ho Chi Minh City, where workers have been sprucing up the streets. A total of 32 different sports will take place in 11 cities and provinces. "Throughout the sports events at the SEA Games, Southeast Asian countries will closely unite, share cultural values and customs and strengthen mutual understanding with an aim to build a unified region," said Sports Minister Nguyen Danh Thai, head of the SEA Games Organizing Committee. "With that spirit, the organizing committee of the host country has been doing all its best to secure a successful SEA Games."
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