■RUGBY UNION
Star charged with assault
All Blacks forward Sione Lauaki has been charged with assault over a bar room incident in his home town of Hamilton last week. Lauaki, a backrower who has played 17 Tests for New Zealand, was charged yesterday after an investigation by Hamilton police. He will appear in the District Court at Hamilton on March 23. The 28-year-old Lauaki was due to return to the Waikato Chiefs side for their Super 14 match against the Canterbury Crusaders tomorrow, ending a two-week suspension for a dangerous tackle. However, Chiefs coach Ian Foster said Lauaki would now be omitted from the team. In 2006 Lauaki avoided conviction after being charged with assaulting a security guard and last year took an anger management course after being charged with damaging an Auckland motel.
■SOCCER
‘Two’s a crowd’ for spot kick
Two J-League players who combined to take a penalty were deemed to have broken the rules, Japanese officials said yesterday. However, the J-League said it would not issue retroactive yellow cards to Hiroshima Sanfrecce’s Tomoaki Makino and Hisato Sato for their prank in Saturday’s 1-1 draw with Shimizu S-Pulse. Hiroshima were awarded a penalty and Makino placed the ball on the spot before retreating to the edge of the box to start his run-up. At that moment, Sato rushed in and kicked the ball, taking the referee and S-Pulse goalkeeper and players by surprise. The Japan Football Association (JFA) ruled the players infringed the laws of the game by deceiving the referee over who would take the kick. Match official Takuto Okabe faces a two-match suspension for allowing the penalty to stand. “Makino was clearly identified as the designated kicker [having placed the ball],” JFA referees’ committee chief Yasuhiro Matsuzaki said. “The moment Sato entered the penalty area there should have been a free kick to Shimizu and a yellow card for unsportsmanlike conduct for Sato. The match officials are supposed to know the rules of the game and were unable to make the right decision. We will consider what [punitive] measures to take.”
■CYCLING
Tandem gold medalist dies
Australian Olympic cycling gold medalist Lionel Cox has died of pneumonia, the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) said. He was 80. Cox won a gold medal with Russell Mockridge in the 2,000m tandem event and silver in the 1,000m sprint at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. AOC historian Harry Gordon said the ride of Cox and Mockridge in the tandem event at Helsinki was one of the most remarkable gold medal performances by any Australians. Their bike had been discarded by the British team and brought from London to Helsinki by Mockridge. Cox had never ridden a tandem nor ridden with Mockridge until a week before the games. “Blokes who’ve trained on tandems for years wouldn’t have done what we did,” Cox recalled years later. “But we gave it a go. We had one kick and a ride, and we gelled.”
■SOCCER
Pienaar banned from driving
South Africa international Steven Pienaar has been banned from driving for 12 months and fined £1,000 (US$1,496) after pleading guilty to drunk driving. Pienaar was also ordered to pay a £100 (US$150) fine on Tuesday for failing to obey a traffic signal. The 27-year-old Everton midfielder was stopped by police on Feb. 21, the day after his club’s 3-1 win over Manchester United at Goodison Park. He was found to be nearly twice the legal limit.
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