■SOCCER
Cacau stars in Stuttgart win
Cacau boosted his chances of a place in Germany’s World Cup squad by scoring the first goal and setting up the second in VfB Stuttgart’s 2-0 victory at relegation-threatened VfL Bochum in the Bundesliga on Friday. The Brazilian-born forward notched his 12th league goal of the season when he scored from close range following good work by Ciprian Marica down the right in the 14th minute. Cacau returned the compliment four minutes later when his neat pass set up the Romanian for Stuttgart’s second goal to give them their sixth win in a row stretching back to the 4-0 Champions League defeat at Barcelona. Bochum’s defeat means only goal difference keeps them ahead of Freiburg, who are 16th and in the relegation playoff spot. Both teams have 28 points, but Freiburg could move above Bochum if they avoid defeat at home to mid-table reigning champions VfL Wolfsburg today. Stuttgart are sixth with 53 points.
■SOCCER
Flamengo coach sacked
Brazilian champions Flamengo sacked coach Andrade and two club officials on Friday, the three men falling victim to the team’s disappointing Libertadores Cup campaign. Flamengo scraped into the knockout phase of South America’s elite club competition on Thursday when, having failed to win their group, they finished sixth and last among the best second-placed teams. “I waited for us to pass to the next phase of the Libertadores, since those people deserve to leave by the club’s front door. After all, they gave the club a national title after 17 years,” club president Patricia Amorim told a news conference at the club’s training ground. Amorim said she would name a new coach over the weekend.
■CYCLING
Vinokourov wins in Italy
Kazakh Alexander Vinokourov of Astana won the 34th edition of the Tour of Trentino on Friday for his first major success of the season, edging out Italy’s Riccardo Ricco of Ceramica Flaminia. Vinokourov squeezed out his rival by just 0.12 seconds after a battle royal over the final kilometer of the fourth and final stage heading for the summit of the Alpe di Pampeago, where Italian Domenico Pozzovivo of Colnago took the stage honors. Vinokourov was unable to keep pace with Ricco, an excellent climber who came in second, just 3 seconds behind Pozzovivo, but the Kazakh was still able to win by the smallest of margins.
■SWIMMING
Li races to 800m victory
Teenager Li Xuanxu has underlined her burgeoning talent by racing to an 800m freestyle victory at the Chinese national championships in the third best time of the year. The 16-year-old, who swam the world’s fastest 400m individual medley time of the year on Thursday, proved she was no slouch at double the distance on Friday by clocking 8 minutes, 24.10 seconds in Shaoxing. Only Britain’s Olympic champion Rebecca Adlington and Australian champion Katie Goldman have swum faster this year.
■GYMNASTICS
Former champion dies at 25
Former Olympic rhythmic gymnastics champion Natalia Lavrova died in a car accident on Friday, the Russian Rhythmic Gymnastics Federation said. Lavrova, 25, was a passenger in a car involved in a head-on collision near the city of Penza, southeast of Moscow, a Penza Province traffic police official said on state-run Rossiya-24 television. Lavrova won gold in the team event at the 2000 and 2004 Olympics.
■ICE HOCKEY
Fans to be charged
Two Canadian hockey fans will be charged after a prank where they replaced a US flag with a Canadian one following Canada’s Olympic gold medal ice hockey victory. US police said Ryan Smith and Matt Seifert would be charged with misdemeanor vandalism and flag desecration. Smith and Seifert celebrated Canada’s gold medal win over the US at the Vancouver Olympics on Feb. 28 by flying the Canadian flag on a California hilltop above the desert town of Palm Springs, but US authorities weren’t amused because they said the US flag was put there to honor the victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New York and Washington eight years ago. Canada became the first host team to win Olympic hockey gold in 30 years when superstar Sidney Crosby scored the winner in overtime to beat the US 3-2.
■BASKETBALL
Ginobili to miss world’s
Argentina’s leading basketball player Manu Ginobili will not play at the world championships in Turkey in August for family reasons, the player said on Friday. The San Antonio Spurs guard, who recently signed a multi-year contract extension with his NBA team, said he wanted to be with his wife who is expecting twins in May and concentrate on the 2012 London Olympic Games. “My two Olympic experiences were the best thing that has happened to me as a sportsman, including [three] NBA titles and I have no doubt in my mind I want to experience it again,” the 32-year-old said in a column in La Nacion online. Ginobili helped Argentina win the basketball gold medal at the Athens Games in 2004 after finishing second at the world championships in the US in 2002.
■BASEBALL
Ramirez put on disabled list
Los Angeles Dodgers slugger Manny Ramirez has been placed on the 15-day disabled list because of a strained right calf muscle, the team said on Friday. “Stan [trainer Stan Conte] called today and told me the nature of the strain, and that Manny felt he needed some time with this thing,” Dodgers manager Joe Torre told Major League Baseball’s official Web site. Ramirez injured the calf muscle during the first week of the season, aggravated it last week and missed two starts before suffering a recurrence of the problem while running to first base in an 8-5 loss to the Cincinnati Reds on Thursday.
■ATHLETICS
Bolt rules out 400m, for now
Usain Bolt says he doesn’t want to move up to running the 400m, but he will do “if it takes that for me to become a legend in sports.” Jamaica’s 100m and 200m Olympic and world champion said he would instead try to defend his titles at the 2012 London Games. Bolt spoke on Friday on a conference call before the start of the Diamond League, a set of 14 races around the world that start on May 14 in Doha. Bolt said he would race at the Diamond League meetings in Shanghai, New York, Paris and Brussels.
■SKIING
Miller waits on US Ski Team
Bode Miller says what he hears from the US Ski Team will play a big role as he decides whether to retire. Miller, fresh from winning gold, silver and bronze at the Vancouver Olympics, said on Friday that he would not decide his future until the team’s preseason camp in August. The 32-year-old Miller said many of the issues that prompted him to start his own team two years ago hadn’t changed when he returned to the US team in the run-up to Vancouver.
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