Champion Jorge Lorenzo leapfrogged Casey Stoner to the top of the MotoGP standings when he won an incident-packed Spanish Grand Prix yesterday after Stoner crashed out in a collision with Valentino Rossi.
Yamaha rider Lorenzo, second behind Stoner at the season opener in Qatar last month, finished 19.339 seconds ahead of compatriot Dani Pedrosa on a slippery Jerez circuit in rainy Andalusia.
Ducati rider Nicky Hayden was third, 29.085 seconds behind Lorenzo, who claimed his second straight Jerez victory.
Photo: AFP
“It was tough, but finally I managed to win on a wet track which I had never done before,” a beaming Lorenzo said.
“It was difficult and we had some luck because maybe without the Valentino and Casey crash we wouldn’t have won, but races are like that and today the fortune was on our side,” he added.
Lorenzo leads the championship standings on 45 points after two races. Pedrosa, who will take advantage of a break in the calendar due to the postponement of the Japanese Grand Prix to have more surgery on his troublesome collarbone, is second on 36 and Stoner third on 25.
Seven-time world champion Rossi of Italy had stormed from 12th on the grid to third when he attempted to overtake Repsol Honda’s Stoner with 20 laps remaining.
As he edged past on the inside his Ducati bike slipped from under him and the two machines collided and slid off the track.
Rossi was able to continue and finished in fifth, while an angry-looking Stoner’s race was over.
Many of the riders struggled in the greasy conditions.
Marco Simoncelli of Honda crashed when leading with 16 laps remaining and Lorenzo’s teammate Ben Spies was second ahead of Pedrosa when he slid off into the gravel with three laps left.
Pedrosa, who is aiming to return for the Portuguese Grand Prix at the beginning of next month, started in second on the grid, but quickly slipped well down the field before charging back.
Andrea Iannone won the Moto2 race, while Spaniard Nicolas Terol took the 125cc category.
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