Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone is confident next year’s world drivers’ championship will be decided by the number of race wins rather than points total as is currently the case.
Under the proposed system, gold medals will be awarded to race winners and the driver securing the most victories by the end of the season would be crowned world champion.
At the moment, a race win earns a driver 10 points, with eight points available for second place and six for third as the top eight finishers receive points.
Ecclestone said the proposal to offer gold, silver and bronze medals instead is a result of last season’s final race when McLaren-Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton took the world title with a fifth-place finish at the season-ending Brazilian Grand Prix.
Championship rival Felipe Massa won the race, but missed out on the title by a single point even though the Ferrari driver finished the season with six race wins to Hamilton’s five.
“It’s going to happen. All the teams are happy,” Ecclestone said at a press conference to introduce LG Electronics as a global partner of the sport from January onward. “It’s just not on that someone can win the world championship without trying to win the race.”
The new medal system will now be discussed by the FIA at the World Motor Sport Council meeting on Dec. 12.
Critics of the plan fear the medal system will reduce the interest to the main teams only, leaving smaller outfits out in the cold.
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