Brazil midfielder Renato Augusto trimmed Borussia Dortmund’s Bundesliga lead to nine points with a superb strike on Sunday to give second-place Bayer Leverkusen a 1-0 win at Mainz.
With the game heading towards a goalless draw, Augusto dispossessed Mainz’s Danish defender Bo Svensson on the edge of the penalty area and drilled home his shot on 82 minutes to poach three points for his team.
“We found things difficult in the first half, particularly in midfield,” Leverkusen coach Jupp Heynckes said.
“In the second half, the team showed passion, great morale and team spirit, so that we took our chances when they came,” he said.
After Dortmund lost 1-0 at Hoffenheim on Saturday, Leverkusen made up some ground on the leaders, while defending champions Bayern Munich are up to fourth, 16 points behind Dortmund, after they hammered Hamburg.
Former Germany captain Michael Ballack played the full 90 minutes for Leverkusen, but failed to make his mark and the 34-year-old looked short of fitness as he tries to win back his place in the national side after injury.
On Sunday night, Stuttgart hauled themselves out of the relegation zone with a 2-1 win at St Pauli.
Substitute Sven Schipplock —making his Bundesliga debut —scored an 88th-minute winner that left St Pauli in the bottom three.
Schipplock, promoted from Stuttgart’s reserves, had only been on the pitch five minutes when he popped up with the winner, which moved his side up to 13th and left the bottom six sides separated by just six points.
“We had a pinch of luck today,” Stuttgart coach Bruno Labaddia said. “I must pay a big compliment to St Pauli, they played really well.”
“We came here under a bit of pressure, because two or three players in my team weren’t quite fully fit,” he said.
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