The first group of Taiwanese athletes competing in the Beijing Olympics headed for the Chinese capital on Thursday to prepare for the competition.
The group included five weightlifters — Wang Hsin-yuan (王信淵), Yang Ching-yu (楊景翊), Yang Sheng-hsiung (楊勝雄), Chen Wei-ling (陳葦綾) and Lu Ying-chi (盧映錡) — and Chang Hao (張浩), who will represent Taiwan in the sailing competition, as well as their respective coaches.
Taiwan’s Olympic delegation leader Tsai Szu-chueh (蔡賜爵) and Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee (CTOC) Secretary-General Chen Kuo-yi (陳國儀) will lead a second group of badminton players, archers, swimmers, shooters, rowers and judo fighters to Beijing tomorrow.
The nation’s Olympic tennis hopes — Chan Yung-jan (詹詠然) and Chuang Chia-jung (莊佳容) — who secured their positions as top seeds in the women’s doubles tournament at the Beijing Olympics after winning the East West Bank Classic in Los Angeles on July 27, are scheduled to leave for Beijing on Thursday, along with table tennis players, the track and field team and the female softball team.
Taiwan’s 80-strong Olympic delegation will compete in 15 sports — archery, baseball, cycling, judo, rowing, sailing, shooting, softball, swimming, table tennis, taekwondo, badminton, tennis, track and field and weightlifting.
They are seen as having the best chances of winning gold in taekwondo, weightlifting, archery and tennis, a CTOC official said.
The nation won two gold medals — both in taekwondo — two silvers and one bronze at the last Olympic Games in 2004 in Athens, ranking 31st in the overall medal standings that year.
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