Kim Clijsters faces a tight deadline to be fit in time for her Australian Open defense after she was forced to retire injured from her Brisbane International semi-final against Daniela Hantuchova yesterday.
Clijsters had fought back from a 4-1 deficit in the first set to win a tiebreak, but took an injury timeout after the third game of the second set, with Hantuchova leading 2-1, for treatment on a hip injury.
The 28-year-old four-time Grand-Slam champion returned, but lost the next game and then retired with the score at 6-7 (4/7), 3-1.
Photo: AFP
Hantuchova, who received a walkover into the semi-finals after Serena Williams pulled out with an ankle injury, meets Kaia Kanepi in the final today after the big-hitting Estonian demolished Francesca Schiavone 6-3, 6-0 in 56 minutes.
“I felt my left hip was getting tighter and tighter to the point I couldn’t move forward with my upper body,” Clijsters said, adding that she had felt tightness in her hip before the semi-final.
In the men’s draw, top seed Andy Murray looked far sharper than in his earlier matches and romped into the semi-finals with a 6-2, 6-2 thrashing of Marcos Baghdatis.
The world No. 4, who will bid to break his Grand-Slam drought at the Australian Open, which begins on Jan. 16, had been less than convincing in his two previous matches, but he was ruthless against the Cypriot.
Murray broke the former Australian Open finalist’s serve four times and served out in 66 minutes.
Murray will now meet Bernard Tomic after the Australian teenager beat Uzbekistan’s Denis Istomin 6-3, 7-6 (7/4).
Today’s semi-final will be the first for Tomic at an ATP Tour-level tournament, though Murray said he would not be taking the 19-year-old lightly.
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