■SOCCER
UEFA passes ‘Fair-Play Plan’
European governing body UEFA on Thursday unanimously approved Michel Platini’s “Financial Fair-Play Plan” which will require clubs to break even by 2012. UEFA president Platini’s initiative will be implemented over the next three years with the cornerstone of the new legislation — the break even requirement — intended to inject fresh financial stability into the way European clubs are managed. Half of Europe’s leading clubs lose money and more than a fifth face huge deficits. Clubs that would fail to meet the new criteria include English Premier League big spenders Manchester City, Liverpool and Chelsea, who have all reported losses running into tens of millions of US dollars. Explaining the move, UEFA president Platini said: “We have worked on the financial fair play concept hand-in-hand with the clubs, as our intention is not to punish them, but to protect them. We have an agreement with the clubs. The philosophy is that you cannot spend more money than you generate. This approval today [Thursday] is the start of an important journey for European football’s club finances as we begin to put stability and economic common sense back into football.”
■FOOTBALL
Ed Wang signs for the Bills
The Buffalo Bills signed offensive lineman Ed Wang on Thursday, after making him the first player of full Chinese descent to be selected in the NFL draft. His parents are former Chinese Olympic athletes who emigrated from China to the US in the 1980s. Wang, who attended Virginia Tech University, was the 140th overall selection in the draft last month and was taken in the fifth round. He was the first of Buffalo’s nine draft picks to sign a contract. “Just to get it all out of the way and show that I’m really here to focus on football, that was my whole point,” Wang told the Bills’ Web site. “I’m really happy. So now I can really just focus on football and do what I have to do on the field.”
■SUMO
Two bosses disciplined
The Japan Sumo Association on Thursday disciplined two of the sport’s bosses for handing favors to yakuza crime figures in the latest scandal to hit Japan’s 2,000-year-old national sport. The association slapped penalties on two stable masters after they allegedly helped senior members of a crime syndicate get exclusive front seats during a tournament last year. One of them, Kise, was downgraded, a move that effectively shuts down his Tokyo stable, where younger sumo wrestlers train. He had reportedly admitted to arranging seats for an acquaintance who runs a business consulting firm. At the association’s board meeting, a wrestler, Kotomitsuki, also apologized following reports that he had gambled illegally on baseball matches and then paid hush money to gangsters.
■CYCLING
De Bonis gets two-year ban
Italian Francesco De Bonis has become the first cyclist to be given a doping ban because of discrepancies in his biological passport. The Italian Olympic Committee suspended him for two years after a request from the International Cycling Union (UCI). “The UCI emphasizes the historic importance of this first judgment under the scope of the biological passport program, introduced by the UCI in 2008,” the UCI said in a statement on Thursday. A biological passport is an electronic record where the results of all doping tests by a rider over a period of time are collated and compared. Spanish rider Antonio Colom Mas has also been given a two-year doping ban.
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