Olympic champion Carlo Janka of Switzerland won a men’s World Cup giant slalom race yesterday, 10 days after having surgery to correct an irregular heartbeat.
The defending overall champion was second after the opening leg and finished in a combined time of 2 minutes, 27.05 seconds for his first victory of the season.
French teenager Alexis Penturault had a blistering second run to jump from 16th to second, trailing Janka by 0.02 seconds, while world giant slalom champion Ted Ligety of the US was 0.12 seconds back in third.
Photo: AFP
Philipp Schoerghofer of Austria, who held a commanding lead after the first run, skied out.
WOMEN’S DOWNHILL
AP, TARVISIO, ITALY
Lindsey Vonn of the US clinched her fourth consecutive downhill crystal globe yesterday by finishing second to Anja Paerson, who posted her first victory of a frustrating season.
Paerson clocked 1 minute, 26.91 seconds down the Prampero course to record a commanding win in a season hampered by knee problems.
It was the 42nd World Cup victory of the Swede’s career, improving her fourth-place position on the all-time list and moving her two in front of Vonn.
Vonn finished 0.73 seconds behind and now holds an insurmountable 143-point lead in the downhill standings over German rival Maria Riesch, who finished sixth but remains the World Cup overall leader.
Riesch is now just 136 points ahead in the overall rankings, with Vonn favored to make up more ground in today’s super-G.
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