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Taiwan cleans up at university games

Huang Yi-hsueh of Taiwan holds his gold medal last week after winning the men's vault at the 2005 Summer Universiade in Izmir, Turkey. PHOTO: CTUSF

With its gold-medal finish in women's volleyball at the 2005 Summer Universiade in Izmir, Turkey, the last group of the Taiwanese delegation returned home on Tuesday to a welcoming crowd.

It was the first-ever gold medal won by a Taiwanese team in any type of intercontinental competition, topping the 1992 Barcelona Olympic baseball squad which took home the silver medal.

Taiwan's medal count of 12 surpassed its previous mark of 11 from the 2003 Summer Universiade in Daegu, South Korea, giving Team Taiwan an unprecedented ninth-place finish among the 130-plus participating nations in this year's Summer Universiade.

Of the 12 medals that the Taiwanese men and women won, six were gold, two were silver and four were bronze.

The six gold medals came in the categories of women's volleyball, women's fly-weight class taekwondo (Wu Yen-ni), women's tennis doubles (Hsieh Shu-wei and Chuang Jia-rong), mixed tennis doubles (Chen Di and Chuang Jia-rong), men's individual recurve archery (Kuo Cheng-wei) and men's vault (Huang Yi-hsueh).

Two Taiwanese women just missed the gold in taekwondo in their respective weight classes, with Yang Shu-jun winning the silver medal in the fin weight class and teammate Chang Yi-lan taking the second-place honor in the bantam-weight class to give Team Taiwan a total of three medals in taekwondo.

Rounding out the rest of the medal winners were Lin Hsiang-wei with a bronze in the men's pommel horse (gymnastics), and a trio of tennis winners in Hsieh Shu-wei and Chan Jin-wei (women's single) and Wang Yu-tso (men's single).

Huang Yi-hsueh's gold medal in the men's vault was especially sweet since the 23-year-old out of the National College of Physical Education and Sports was not favored to be in the medal's round.

"I did it, I finally did it this time!" Huang said after he received the first gold medal for Taiwan in this year's competition.

Tennis became the sport with most medal winners this year, surpassing perennial top medal-earner taekwondo, by netting Taiwan a total of five medals this year.

The women's basketball team ended the 10-day competition with a respectable fifth-place finish after beating the German ladies in an 83-38 landslide win in its final game.
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