Unheralded Zach Railey of the US continued to throw down the gauntlet to defending Olympic Finn champion Ben Ainslie with another strong performance yesterday.
Railey moved up from second overnight to take the overall lead after finishing second in races three and four on the second day of the regatta in Fushan Bay.
The American has 11 points with Briton Ainslie, bidding for a third Olympic gold after his Laser success in Sydney followed by Finn gold four years ago in Athens, second with 16 points after taking the gun in the final race of the day. Canada’s Christopher Cook lies third, 12 points adrift of Ainslie.
“It’s an honor to be leading, I’ve been training really hard for this,” Railey said. “But we’re only four races into this, this is a very long event, we’re not even halfway through. I’ll take it one day and one race at a time and just keep on moving.”
Ainslie had to settle for fourth place in race three, losing ground after opting to take a penalty turn while dueling with Railey.
“He had a fantastic opportunity to protest me and probably get me disqualified so I had to take a penalty turn which cost me distance,” said Ainslie, unbeaten in regattas in the heavyweight Finn dinghy since the Athens Games. “It’s the Olympics and you try and you do anything you can to get an advantage on your opponent and most of the fleet try and give me a hard time when they can.”
Ainslie said Railey was a serious contender for a medal.
“He’s sailing really well. He’s been in the class for three years and continually improving. We will have to see if we can give him a hard time in the next couple of days,” Ainslie said.
British Yngling trio Sarah Ayton, Sarah Webb and Pippa Wilson retained their lead in their three-woman keelboat. The trio have 16 points with Finland’s Silja Lehtinen, Maria Klemetz and Livia Varesmaa second on 23 points.
Ayton and Webb, along with Shirley Robertson, won Yngling gold in 2004. Ayton and Webb split with Robertson after Athens and pipped Robertson’s new team to win selection for these Games.
Defending 49er champions Iker Martinez and Xabier Fernandez languished in eighth place after three races, despite the Spaniards taking the gun in the opener. Britain’s Stevie Morrison and Ben Rhodes set the pace, followed by Italy’s Sibello brothers.
The 49er is the only class that will sail a 16-race series. Other classes sail 11.
Racing continues today in all three classes, with opening races at four other events, RS:X windsurfers for men and for women, and 470 dinghies, also with men’s and women’s classes.
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