■RUGBY LEAGUE
Sharks fallout widens
Club chairman Barry Pierce and skipper Paul Gallen have relinquished their positions in the continuing fallout enveloping Australian NRL crisis club Cronulla Sharks. The embattled Sharks have been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons amid revelations of a gang sex incident in 2002, a positive drug test from back-rower Reni Maitua, racial vilification by Gallen and crippling debts. Pierce announced his resignation to a Sharks board meeting after 10 years at the helm.
■SOCCER
Cambodia re-hires TV pundit
Former television soccer pundit Scott O’Donell has returned as coach of Cambodia after the penniless Southeast Asian strugglers secured enough cash to bring him back. The Australian lost his coaching job in December 2007 after the sponsors paying his salary pulled the plug on funding for the ragtag team, who have never won a trophy and sit 179th in the FIFA rankings. “I’m happy to be back,” O’Donell told reporters. “I signed a one-year contract. We’ll take it from there and see how it goes.”
■BOXING
Haye drops Klitschko fight
David Haye has pulled out of his world heavyweight title fight with IBF and WBO champion Wladimir Klitschko because of an injury. The British fighter had been scheduled to challenge Klitschko before a sellout crowd of more than 60,000 in Germany on June 20. Haye’s camp said Wednesday he sustained an injury in training and had to pull out. The nature of the injury was not immediately known.
■SOCCER
Ze Roberto to leave Bayern
Brazilian midfielder Ze Roberto has decided to leave Bayern Munich after they failed to offer him a two-year contract extension, the Bundesliga club said on Wednesday. “Ze was offered an extension until June 30, 2010, but unfortunately he did not accept it,” Bayern general director Karl-Heinz Rummenigge said on the club Web site. The 34-year-old Brazilian played six years for the club, winning the championship and Cup double four times.
■ICE HOCKEY
Major shakeup at Avalanche
The Colorado Avalanche fired coach Tony Granato and five others on Wednesday while promoting Greg Sherman to general manager in a revamp after their worst NHL season. Sherman served as an assistant general manager for the past seven years and will be given the task of reviving the club that finished last in the Western Conference with a league-worst 190 goals.
■SOCCER
Armed gang threatens team
An armed gang interrupted training at Argentine first-division club San Martin-Tucuman, threatened the players and fired at least one shot into the air, one of the players said on Wednesday. Argentine media said around 50 supporters invaded the practice and demanded the relegation-threatened team win their last three games. “They started to argue and threaten us,” San Martin’s Chilean striker Cristian Canio said in an interview with the ADN radio station in his homeland. “They said that if we didn’t win the nine points we still have to play for, we would have to face the consequences.” San Martin, beaten 3-0 at Boca Juniors on Sunday, are 19th in the relegation standings, which are decided over three seasons. The bottom two in the 20-team table go straight down.
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