■Baseball
Taiwan team aiming high
Taiwan’s university national team will open the 2010 World University Baseball Championship today in Tokyo, hoping to win the tournament for the first time ever. The team’s confidence is high after two wins and one loss in a three-game warm-up series in Taipei from Sunday to Tuesday against defending champions the US. Taiwan beat the US 3-1 and 1-0 in the first two games before dropping the last one 6-3 in the exhibition series. The US were 9-0 in the summer prior to the series. However, Taiwan’s manager Yeh Chih-shien refused to be too optimistic. “At the college level, I don’t think you can find any team that is better than this US team, which is well-balanced from top to bottom,” he said. Taiwan are scheduled to meet Canada today at the Meiji Jingu Stadium in the opening game. The US — seeking a fourth consecutive title in the championship — and Sri Lanka will meet Taiwan on Sunday and Monday, respectively, in other preliminary group games. China, South Korea, Cuba and hosts Japan face off in a much tougher Group B.
■Baseball
Seedy outburst earns ban
Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland was issued a one-game suspension by Major League Baseball (MLB) on Wednesday after spraying a mouthful of sunflower seeds on an umpire in an argument. Leyland was also issued a fine of an undisclosed amount in addition to the banishment that sidelined him for the Tigers game on Wednesday at Tampa Bay. MLB issued the punishment to Leyland for inappropriate and aggressive conduct on Monday in the third inning of a game at Tampa Bay. Leyland was ejected during a dispute with second base umpire Marty Foster over what the manager claimed was an accidental spraying of seeds as he sputtered out his disagreement over a decision.
■Soccer
Fighting ends ‘friendly’
A pre-season friendly between Sardinia’s Cagliari and Corsica’s Bastia was abandoned after 75 minutes on Wednesday after players repeatedly fought each other, the Italian side said in a statement. Serie A Cagliari were beating the French team 3-0 when the referee called a halt to the match in Sardinia between two of the top teams from the neighboring islands.
■Soccer
Players can break fast
A Muslim group and German authorities said on Wednesday they have determined that professional Muslim players may break their fast during the holy month of Ramadan. The announcement followed a dispute involving second-division club FSV Frankfurt, which last year gave a formal warning to three of its players for fasting. During Ramadan, devout Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. The club had a clause in contracts stating that wasn’t allowed without its express permission. Germany’s Central Council of Muslims said it sought advice from Al-Azhar in Egypt, the pre-eminent theological institute of Sunni Islam, and elsewhere. Al-Azhar ruled that if a footballer is obliged to perform under a contract that is his only source of income, if he has to play matches during Ramadan, and if fasting affects his performance, then he can break his fast, the council said. The European Council for Fatwa and Research supported that ruling. “The Muslim professional can make good the fasting days in times when there are no matches, and so continue to pay God and the holy month of Ramadan honor and respect,” Aiman Mazyek, the general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims, said in a statement.
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