Lewis Hamilton has mended fences with McLaren a day after castigating his Formula One team for denying him a podium with their “fricking terrible” pit stop strategy at the Australian Grand Prix.
“The team has explained to me their reasoning behind the second pit stop, and I can understand what they were trying to do,” the 2008 world champion said on his Web site on Monday.
Hamilton had been chasing Renault’s Robert Kubica for second place when McLaren told him to come in for a second change of tires.
That dropped him back down the order and he ended up sixth after colliding with Red Bull’s Australian Mark Webber on the penultimate lap. Kubica finished second behind Hamilton’s winning teammate Jenson Button.
Hamilton, who had told BBC television after the race that he wanted to know who had made the call, said he now accepted that McLaren had been trying to protect him from being passed later in the race by Webber and Mercedes’ Nico Rosberg.
“We are still learning about this year’s tires and the degradation, and perhaps we over-estimated the wear that the frontrunners were expecting to suffer. It’s something you learn from, and we’ll use that knowledge to help us improve throughout this season,” he said
Button’s win was the world champion’s first for McLaren after just two starts and Hamilton made clear there was no frostiness between them.
“As soon as Jenson finished in the press conference, I went down to see him and I gave him a big hug. You can’t take anything away from his drive in Australia — it was faultless, and he thoroughly deserved the victory,” Hamilton said. “You always love to win, but if it can’t be for me, then I want it to be my teammate.”
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