Taiwanese relay team strike gold

Taiwan held off challenges from Japan and China to secure the coveted gold medal in the men’s 4x100m relay at the East Asian Games yesterday and then completed its gold medal haul in Hong Kong by winning the badminton men’s doubles.

The two gold medals brought Taiwan’s total to eight in the quadrennial sports competition, which ended yesterday.

Taiwan’s team of Tu Chia-lin, Liu Yuan-kai, Tsai Meng-lin and Yi Wei-chen won the 4x100m relay in a time of 39.31 seconds, their season’s best, but still 0.4 seconds off the East Asian Games record of 38.93 seconds set by Japan in 2001.

Japan was second with a time of 39.40 seconds and China won bronze with a time of 39.86 seconds.

The gold medal was only the fifth Taiwan has won in the athletics competition — traditionally a weak discipline for the country’s athletes — at the Games.

In 1993, sprinter Wang Hui-chen won gold in the women’s 100m and 200m and Nai Hui-fang captured a gold in the men’s long jump. Eight years later in 2001, Chen Tien-wen took gold in the men’s 400m hurdles.

In badminton, Taiwan’s Hu Chung-hsien and Tsai Chia-hsin defeated compatriots Chen Hung-ling and Lin Yu-lang in straight sets 21-17, 22-20 to win gold in the men’s doubles tournament.

The winning duo dropped only one set in winning four consecutive matches to emerge victorious.

Taiwan finished the Games with a total of eight golds, 34 silvers and 37 bronzes to finish fifth out of nine teams in the medals table.

Meanwhile, China’s “Diving Queen,” Guo Jingjing, reigned supreme on the final day in Hong Kong — then said reports she had quit the sport or was about to were premature.

The most decorated woman diver in Olympic history and China’s most famous female athlete, Guo claimed gold with compatriot Wu Minxia in the women’s 3m synchronized springboard.

The 28-year-old Guo has won six Olympic medals, four of them gold, including a double at last year’s Beijing Olympics, but there has been mounting speculation about her future in the sport.

Before Beijing, she said that she would retire after those Games, but later backtracked.

“I’ve taken part in so many events, we’ll wait and see,” she told reporters yesterday when asked if she would still be around to compete in next year’s Asian Games in southern China or the 2012 London Olympics. “Next year still needs to be arranged by the national team and it’s not for me to decide. I need to listen to the national team. It’s a bit early to say now.”

Asked whose decision retirement was, she replied: “I want to take part in future competitions.”

“I hear about my ‘retirement’ from the press and then people ask me if I want to retire,” she joked, also batting away questions about her personal life.

Her high-profile relationships in recent years have made her prime gossip-column fodder in Hong Kong and China.

Guo and Wu’s comfortable victory after an indifferent start helped an all-powerful China finish on 113 golds in the medals table, nearly twice as many as second-placed Japan, who had 62.

South Korea were third and the hosts — still reveling in their unexpected gold medal in the soccer a day earlier — sat fourth overall.

Another of China’s biggest sports stars, badminton world No. 2 Lin Dan, lost in the men’s final to little-known South Korean Choi Ho-Jin in one of the biggest shocks of the Games.