■ SPEEDSKATING
Ohno heats up track
Apolo Anton Ohno of the US won the 1,500m race on Friday at a World Cup short track speedskating meet in Bormio, Italy, a key competition ahead of next year's Winter Olympics in Turin. Ohno, the Olympic champion at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, won in 2 minutes, 27.716 seconds. South Korea's Lee Ho-suk was second in 2:27.786 and Canada's Charles Hamelin took bronze in 2:27.982. Jin Sun-yu of South Korea took the gold medal in the women's 1,500m race in 2:33.578, ahead of compatriot Choi Eun-kyung and China's Yang Yang. The events in the northern Italian town of Bormio continue through Sunday. Results from the competitions will be combined with those from next week's World Cup meet in The Hague, Netherlands, to determine how many skaters for each country will qualify for February's Winter Games. Each country can win up to three spots for its racers in each event.
■ RUGBY
Fire disrupts today's match
Thousands of rugby fans with tickets for today's Ireland-New Zealand test will be turned away after a fire forced a temporary closure of part of Lansdowne Road in Dublin, Ireland. Although the blaze was restricted to a small area under the North Terrace, the Irish Rugby Football Union said that entire area must be closed until a full safety inspection was carried out, and that will be after the game. The closure does not affect the seats immediately behind the goalline. The suspension affected 7,500 ticketholders in the 49,000-seat stadium, according to an Irish TV report. "North Terrace ticketholders are advised it will not be possible to gain access to any other area of the stadium," the IRFU said in a statement. "In the interest of safety and crowd control, North Terrace ticketholders are earnestly asked not to come to the vicinity of the ground." The IRFU said it will soon advise about refunds.
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