South Korea and Argentina won Olympic taekwondo gold medals on Friday in two dramatically different finals.
In the women’s 67kg division, Hwang Kyung-seon defended the title she first won at the Beijing Games by beating Nur Tatar of Turkey 12-5 in an action-packed final where both fighters were on the attack from the start.
On the men’s side, Sebastian Crismanich of Argentina won the country’s first gold of the London Games in the 80kg division.
Photo: Reuters
In Hwang’s bout, both fighters landed head kicks nearly simultaneously within the opening 12 seconds before Hwang took control, nailing Tatar with several more body and head shots.
The 26-year-old two-times world champion Hwang previously won a bronze in Athens and became the first woman to win three Olympic taekwondo medals.
Hwang used her speed and flexibility to dominate all of her matches on Friday.
Photo: EPA
She said there was pressure on the Korean team to bring home gold medals, since the martial art was developed there. Until Hwang’s win, Lee Dae-hoon’s silver in the men’s 58kg division on Wednesday was the country’s only medal.
“It feels like flying,” Hwang said afterwards. “I’ve done something special for the country and it makes me very proud.”
The bronze medals were won by Paige McPherson of the US and Germany’s Helena Fromm.
Crismanich defeated Spain’s Nicolas Garcia in a cautious final where both fighters seemed reluctant to attack. Crismanich ultimately managed to land a body shot with eight seconds remaining to win 1-0.
Crismanich, 26, won the Pan-American championships last year, but the gold was his first Olympic medal.
In most of his matches on Friday, Crismanich was on the attack early, catching his opponents off guard with a rapid succession of body shots and head kicks.
Several of the division’s top seeds made an early exit, including the US’ five-times world champion Steven Lopez, Iran’s world champion Yousef Karami and top seed Ramin Azizov of Azerbaijan.
The world No. 1, Britain’s Aaron Cook, was conspicuously absent after UK officials refused to choose him for the team. Cook said he felt cheated and was being punished for his decision to leave the national training program.
“I don’t think I can ever move on from what they’ve done to me,” Cook 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