An untried Australian combination rode one of the fastest team pursuit times to beat arch-rivals Britain in the Melbourne World Cup round yesterday.
Cameron Meyer, Rohan Dennis, Michael Hepburn and Luke Durbridge clocked 3 minutes, 59.599 seconds to win the gold medal ride-off.
The British, who broke Australia’s world record to win the team pursuit at last year’s Beijing Olympics, fielded three members of their outstanding team squad — Steven Burke, Edward Clancy and Andrew Tennant —= with Andrew Fenn coming in for Geraint Thomas. They had qualified fastest ahead of Australia, but in the gold medal ride their pace line was broken at the 3km mark of the 4km distance.
They were down by just under a second when the second man briefly lost touch with the leader, ensuring they would lose, and they finished in 4 minutes, 1.935 seconds. It was the second gold medal at this Cup round for Meyer after Thursday’s win in the points race.
Australia won two gold medals on the second day of the World Cup, with Scott Sunderland winning the 1km time trial. The home nation leads the medal tally with five gold medals.
German Carsten Bergemann won the the keirin final and New Zealander Tom Scully took out the men’s scratch race.
In the women’s events, China’s Gong Jinjie and Lin Junhong won the team sprint in 33.500 seconds from the Netherlands and Australia, while Italian world champion Giorgia Bronzini won the 20km points race.
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