■ROLLER SKATING
Taiwanese takes gold
A 16-year-old Taiwanese won the country’s first gold medal at the 2010 Asian Roller Skating Championships in Kaohsiung City on Monday on the first day of the week-long competition. Fan Chih-ling won the junior women’s 15,000m race, barely edging out fellow Taiwanese Li Meng-chu. “I originally would have been happy just making it into the top three. I never thought I would win,” Fan said. Huang Chin-lung, head coach of Taiwan’s team, said that while the 1.53m Fan does not stand out physically, she makes up for it with hard work. Fan trains six hours a day and is able to concentrate on the sport because there is no television in her home.
■SOCCER
Sorcery claim denied
A spokesman for Jose Mourinho denied on Monday that the “Special One” had sought the help of witchdoctors as he prepared to start his new job as coach of Real Madrid. “I categorically deny this stupid and unbelievable story ... which is an attempt to damage the image and professional credibility of Mourinho,” Elado Parames said. “Mourinho never talked to this person,” said Parames, who accompanied the Real coach and his family on holiday to Kenya earlier this month when the meeting with the jujumen is alleged to have taken place. On Sunday, Mzee Makthub, a Mombasa medicine man, said that Mourinho had been to see him and three colleagues. “He asked us to help him succeed in his new job,” Makthub said. Parames said that Mourinho was not the kind of man to seek help from a juju man. “Jose Mourinho is profoundly Catholic and he believes in God,” Parames said. “In matters that concern his professional life, he believes in hard work and not in the miracles of any old sorcerer.”
■SOCCER
Player attempts to choke ref
Jose Pedroso, who grabbed a referee around the throat and tried to choke him during a weekend match in Chile’s second division, has resigned from the club. Elias Vistoso, president of the second-division club Rangers, said on Monday that the Paraguayan had left the club following the incident on Saturday in a league match between Rangers and Concepcion. The scene involving Pedroso and referee Marcelo Miranda was captured on video and has been posted on the Web site YouTube. The incident took place shortly after Miranda allowed Concepcion to take a penalty four times, waving off attempts because of various infractions. Concepcion converted the first, missed the next two and finally converted the fourth in the team’s victory. Pedroso later charged at Miranda after the referee showed him a second yellow card for a violent tackle. As Miranda approached to show the card, Pedroso slipped behind him and grabbed the referee around the neck. After releasing him, he chased after Miranda and had to be wrestled to the ground by teammates. Pedroso was quoted telling the Chilean newspaper La Tercera that he had no regrets. “I’m not the least bit sorry,” he was quoted saying. “Now I’m going to Paraguay.”
■SOCCER
Tottenham ban vuvuzelas
Tottenham Hotspur have banned vuvuzelas from their White Hart Lane ground, saying they pose a risk to public safety. The Premier League club banned the long plastic horns after consulting police and licensing authorities. “We are concerned that the presence of the instruments within the stadium poses unnecessary risks to public safety and could impact on the ability of all supporters to hear any emergency safety announcements,” the London club said on Monday.
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