■DEAFLYMPICS
Taipei 2009 to cost NT$4bn
The Taipei City Government has estimated that next year’s Summer Deaflympics Taipei will cost about NT$4 billion (US$125.39 million), an official said yesterday. Emile Sheng (盛治仁), head of the city’s Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, said that nearly 4,000 athletes from 80 countries had already registered to take part. The premier international competition for the hearing impaired will be held in Taipei from Sept. 5 to Sept. 15 next year. The main stadium, being built next to the Taipei Arena, is expected to be completed in December. Sheng said the city government would hold a series of activities to promote the Taipei Deaflympics, including an athletics invitational in May. The first major event was a one-year countdown ceremony last Friday, with actors Lin Ching-hsia (林青霞) and Jackie Chan (成龍) attending to serve as image ambassadors. The city plans to invite other celebrities such as singer Celine Dion and NBA star Yao Ming (姚明) to Taiwan to promote the Deaflympics.
■SOCCER
McDermott leaves Magpies
Newcastle assistant manager Terry McDermott and reserve team coach Adam Sadler have both left the Premier League club following the departure last week of manager Kevin Keegan. McDermott, a former Newcastle player, had been taking first-team coaching since last week when the splits between Keegan and the board which led to the United boss’s resignation started to come out into the open. Keegan and McDermott have an association stretching back more than 30 years to the time when both men were players in the successful Liverpool teams of the mid-1970s. Former England midfielder McDermott had been a coach at Newcastle since 1992 when Keegan first became manager of the north-east side.
■BASEBALL
Yankees plan to keep Girardi
The New York Yankees plan to retain Joe Girardi as manager next year. “Joe will be back,” co-chairman Hank Steinbrenner said on Monday at the club’s spring training complex. “He’s done everything he could. That’s the bottom line.” Girardi is in his first season managing the Yankees after agreeing to a three-year contract last October. The team is likely to miss the Major League Baseball playoffs for the first time since 1993, but Girardi wasn’t expected to be fired. New York has been hit hard by injuries to Taiwanese ace Wang Chien-ming (王建民), catcher Jorge Posada, pitcher Joba Chamberlain and slugger Hideki Matsui. The offense has struggled and the back end of the rotation has been largely ineffective.
■BASEBALL
Red Sox hail 456th sellout
Boston Red Sox owners and players greeted fans and handed out commemorative tickets to mark the Major League Baseball team’s record-breaking 456th straight regular-season sellout on Monday. The Red Sox began their streak on May 15, 2003, and broke the Cleveland Indians’ mark, set from June 12, 1995, to April 2, 2001, at Jacobs Field. Just down the street, Boston pitchers Tim Wakefield and Mike Timlin, two of four players who have been with the team throughout the streak, smiled and handed out the souvenir tickets. Nearby, team owners John Henry and Tom Werner and president Larry Lucchino shook hands with and thanked fans at the turnstiles as they entered 96-year-old Fenway Park. Fenway has the smallest seating capacity in the majors, 36,984 for day games. It seats 37,400 for night games.
Taiwanese world No. 1 women’s doubles star Hsieh Su-wei on Saturday overcame a first-set loss to win her opening match at the Madrid Open. Top seeds Hsieh and partner Elise Mertens of Belgium, with whom she last month won her fourth Indian Wells women’s doubles title, bounced back from a rocky first set to beat Asia Muhammad of the US and Aldila Sutjiadi of Indonesia 2-6, 6-4, 10-2. Hsieh and Mertens were next to face Heather Watson of the UK and Xu Yifan of China in the round of 16. Thirty-eight-year-old Hsieh last month reclaimed her world No. 1 spot after her Indian
EYES ON THE PRIZE: Armed with three solid men’s singles shuttlers and doubles Olympic champions, Taiwan aim to make their first Thomas Cup semi-final, Chou Tien-chen said Taiwanese badminton star Tai Tzu-ying yesterday quickly dispatched Malaysia’s Goh Jin Wei in straight sets, while her male counterpart Chou Tien-chen beat Germany’s Kai Schaefer, as Taiwan’s women’s and men’s teams won their Group B opening rounds of the TotalEnergies BWF Thomas and Uber Cup Finals in Chengdu, China. World No. 5 Tai beat Goh 21-19, 22-20 in a speedy 33 minutes, her fourth straight victory over the world No. 24 shuttler since they first faced each other in the quarter-finals of the 2018 Malaysia Open, where Tai went on to win the women’s singles title. Malaysia followed up Tai’s opening victory
Chen Yi-tung (陳奕通) secured a historic Olympic berth on Sunday by winning the senior men’s foil event at the 2024 Asia Oceania Zonal Olympic Fencing Qualifiers in United Arab Emirates. Chen defeated Samuel Elijah of Singapore 15-4 in the final in Dubai to secure the only wild card in the event, making him the first male Olympian fencer from Taiwan in 36 years and only the sixth Taiwanese fencer to ever qualify for the quadrennial event. The last appearance by a Taiwanese male fencer at the Olympics was in 1988, when Wang San-tsai (王三財) and Cheng Ming-hsiang (鄭明祥) competed in Seoul. The
A soccer jersey carrying a national map including disputed Western Sahara has become a hot commodity in Morocco after a diplomatic dispute with Algeria. Retailers said RS Berkane jerseys have been flying off the shelves after a Confederation of African Football (CAF) Cup match against Algerian club USM Alger was canceled last month over the jerseys. “We are overwhelmed by the influx of messages and requests,” said Brahim Rabii, representative of the official RS Berkane jersey distributor. Algeria broke off diplomatic relations with Morocco in 2021, partly over the issue of Western Sahara. The former Spanish colony is largely controlled by Morocco, but claimed