Former Olympic basketball player Sui Feifei caused an internet storm at the weekend by wearing a trendy Ed Hardy tracksuit top featuring the Japanese flag when collecting her Chinese Coach of the Year award.
Sui, coach to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) team and technically a serving officer in China’s military, provoked the ire of nationalists after being pictured in the designer top at the Women’s Chinese Basketball Association awards in Jiangsu. “Fire Sui Feifei! A PLA wearing a Japanese sweater!” one poster wrote on sports.cn.yahoo.com.
“She has to realize that she is a PLA officer. It is unacceptable for her to wear such a sweater in a public place. This is a very sensitive issue for many people,” the poster wrote.
Japan invaded and occupied much of China between 1931 and 1945. Rancor over wartime atrocities has subsided somewhat as a diplomatic flashpoint, but it continues to shape public attitudes in towards Japan.
Last month, the head of the country’s top sports university said China must urgently address the physical fitness of the nation’s youth or run the risk of raising a generation incapable of fighting the Japanese in a future war.
What athletes wear on national duty is also sensitive, as curler Wang Fengchun discovered when he was wore a US team cap with his Chinese uniform on the way home from the Winter Olympics.
His sacking was compounded by the offense, officials said.
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