■ BASKETBALL
Maccabi replace coach
Israeli basketball champions Maccabi Tel Aviv have replaced coach Oded Kattash after a disappointing start to the season. Kattash will be replaced by Maccabi general manager Tzvika Sherf, a veteran Israeli coach who also heads the national team. "The club needs a change," Kattash said in a statement. Kattash, a star player for Maccabi whose career was cut short by a knee injury, got the coaching job after only two years' experience. "Perhaps we erred in picking an inexperienced person," club vice chairman David Federman told Channel 10 TV. Despite loading up with expensive foreign contract players, the team has lost several games in Euroleague competition and, unusually for Maccabi, also lost three local league games. Longtime Maccabi chairman Shimon Mizrahi insisted that Kattash left of his own accord. "He was not fired or told to quit," Mizrahi said.
■ SOCCER
Player suffered heart failure
Motherwell captain Phil O'Donnell died of heart failure, the club said on Tuesday. "The post-mortem revealed that Phil had suffered left ventricular failure of the heart," Motherwell team doctor Robert Liddle said in a statement by the Scottish Premier League team. The 35-year-old midfielder collapsed on Saturday as he was about to be substituted at Fir Park during Motherwell's 5-3 league victory over Dundee United. O'Donnell was treated on the field for about five minutes and then carried off on a stretcher and taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, but the club later announced his death. His funeral will take place tomorrow. Motherwell's next two league matches have been postponed, while yesterday's game between Glasgow rivals Celtic and Rangers was also called off as a mark of respect for O'Donnell.
■ FOOTBALL
A.J. Smith signs extension
A.J. Smith has signed a five-year contract extension to serve as general manager of the San Diego Chargers, the playoff-bound National Football League (NFL) club announced in San Diego on Tuesday. The deal is reportedly worth US$11 million, which would give the 58-year-old executive the third-highest average salary in the NFL for his job. "By re-signing and extending our key, core players, we now have one of the league's most stable rosters. Those efforts have helped us build a young team that's winning now and built for success for years to come," Chargers president Dean Spanos said. Smith, the Chargers' general manager since 2003, built a team that went 14-2 last season but lost in the first round of the playoffs.
■ ATHLETICS
Sun Yingjie plans comeback
A Chinese long-distance runner who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs has registered for a marathon this weekend in what would be her first race after a two-year suspension, a race official said yesterday. Sun Yingjie, who won bronze in the 10,000m at the 2003 Paris World Championships, failed a urine test for the testosterone derivative androsterone at the Chinese National Games in 2005. Her two-year ban was upheld despite a civil court's ruling that another athlete spiked her drink with the drug. She has registered for the Xiamen International Marathon on Saturday in southern China, said an official in the race's competition department, surnamed Chen, who refused to give her full name. Chen said she didn't know if Sun planned to race.
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