Finn Heikki Kovalainen secured his maiden Formula One victory in dramatic circumstances yesterday when he won the Hungarian Grand Prix for the McLaren Mercedes team.
The 26-year-old took full advantage when luckless Brazilian Felipe Massa pulled up and retired with three laps remaining after the engine on his Ferrari car blew up on the main straight. As smoke billowed from his car, Massa slowed and stopped, gifting the quiet Nordic driver his first win in his first season with the McLaren team after spending his rookie year at Renault.
Massa’s Ferrari teammate, defending drivers world champion Finn Kimi Raikkonen, came home third behind the amazing German Timo Glock, who was second for Toyota just two weeks after leaving the German Grand Prix in an ambulance following a big crash.
Two-times world champion Spaniard Fernando Alonso, the man who swapped seats with Kovalainen, was fourth for Renault, ahead of championship leading Briton Lewis Hamilton in the second McLaren. Hamilton, who started from pole ahead of Massa, was out-paced off the grid and passed at the opening corner. He ran second for a long period until a puncture after 41 of the 70 laps wrecked his hopes of completing a hat-trick of wins.
Massa led brilliantly until three laps from the finish when he was hit by misfortune and had to pull out, leaving Kovalainen to grab the best result of his career.
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