Atletico Madrid secured the final Champions League spot and the millions of euros that accompany it with a 3-0 home win over Almeria on Saturday.
Atletico needed just a draw to clinch fourth but they cruised to a 3-0 victory to qualify for the Champions League.
Argentine Sergio “Kun” Aguero and Raul Garcia put Atletico 2-0 up before Diego Forlan scored for the eighth successive match to take his season’s tally to 32. Atletico join champions Barcelona, Real Madrid and Sevilla as Spain’s Champions League representatives and coach Abel Resino, originally seen as a stop-gap, has staked his claim to continue in the job next season.
Forlan’s old club Villarreal, runners-up last season, won 3-2 at Real Mallorca but Atletico’s win meant they had to settle for fifth and a Europa league place.
Villarreal must now concentrate on trying to hang onto their highly-rated Chilean coach Manuel Pellegrini, 55, who has emerged as a strong candidate for the Real Madrid job.
Valencia clinched the final European spot with a 2-0 home win over defeated Kings Cup finalists Athletic Bilbao.
David Villa scored both goals to take his season’s tally to 28.
Villa and David Silva will be hot property in the summer with the big clubs set to come calling with their checkbooks and Valencia may be unable to resist having missed out on the Champions League.
Valencia’s win meant Deportivo, who drew 1-1 with Barcelona, missed out on Europe.
Barca were given a guard of honor at the Riazor to salute their historical league, Kings Cup and Champions League treble.
Coach Pep Guardiola started with five of the starting XI that beat Manchester United in the Champions League final with Samuel Eto’o netting a late equalizer.
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