■ Basketball
Bogut signs Bucks contract
The Milwaukee Bucks signed Andrew Bogut, the top selection in the National Basketball Association's annual draft, to a multiyear contract in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Friday. The 20-year-old Australian center, who earned college player of the year awards at the University of Utah, will participate in the Bucks' summer camp workouts and play in the Minnesota Summer League July 15-19, general manager Larry Harris said. "This is a dream come true for me," Bogut said. "I've worked extremely hard to get to this point and I'm honored to be a member of the Milwaukee Bucks organization." Terms of the contract weren't disclosed, but Bogut's agent, David Bauman, previously said he expected the 2.14m center to get around US$4.2 million in his first year.
■ Soccer
Scandal keeps spreading
The German match-fixing trial will involve 42 soccer games spread over three countries, a Berlin newspaper reported Friday. The Suddeutsche Zeitung said Berlin state district attorney Petra Leister has listed 170 witnesses in a 289-page document detailing the case against three Croatian brothers. The brothers have admitted fixing matches to bet on, running their operation through a Berlin cafe. Their targets were usually German second and third division games, as well as German Cup matches. Up to now, prosecutors have only confirmed that 14 players and four referees were among the 25 people under investigation. They haven't cited any matches outside Germany as rigged. According to the newspaper, Leister will try to prove matches were fixed, or there were attempts to do so, in four German cities, as well as Ankara, Turkey, plus two Italian cities, including Frosinone.
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