Anna Nordqvist won the LPGA Tour Championship on Monday as Lorena Ochoa seized her fourth straight Player of the Year award by one point over Shin Jiyai.
Nordqvist, 22, fired a final-round 65 to finish at 13-under 203 in the tournament reduced to 54 holes because of heavy rain over the weekend.
Ochoa was two strokes back on 205 and secured the top player honor when South Korea’s Shin couldn’t chip in from the front of the 18th green.
PHOTO: AFP
Shin led Ochoa by eight points (156-148) in the Player of the Year race entering the season-ending event.
Once Ochoa was sure of finishing second in the tournament, Shin had to place no worse than seventh to win Player of the Year.
Shin settled for a par on the last hole completing a 73 that left her tied for eighth on 210. That gave Ochoa the player award by 160-159 points.
Shin had already wrapped up Rookie of the Year honors, and is the first South Korean to finish first on the LPGA money list.
Nordqvist, meanwhile, earned her second LPGA victory and made it through the season without missing a cut in 15 starts. She also won the LPGA Championship this year.
South Korea’s Choi Na-yeon (64) and second-round leader Kristy McPherson (70) finished tied for third on 206.
Sweden’s Sophie Gustafson and South Koreans Kim Song-hee and Park Hee-young were tied on 209, and Shin was joined on 210 by Japan’s Ai Miyazato, Norway’s Suzanne Pettersen and Taiwan’s Yani Tseng.
Shin may have been feeling the pressure s she struggled with her putter on the front nine. She didn’t make a birdie until the 11th, when Ochoa was already within a shot of the lead.
Back-to-back bogeys by Ochoa at eight and nine opened the door for Nordqvist. Ochoa rebounded with a birdie at 15 to set up the dramatic finish.
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