Norway retained its Olympic women’s handball title, winning 26-23 in the final on Saturday against a Montenegro team earning a first-ever medal for their country.
Norway began a heavy favorite as the defending Olympic, world and European champion, and ended the London Games among the Scandinavian country’s biggest sports success stories. Crown Prince Hakkon and Princess Mette-Marit were courtside at the Basketball Arena in Olympic Park to watch the victory.
“In team sports, it’s the biggest team in Norway,” Norway coach Thorir Hergeirsson said. “It’s been a tough trip, we had a lot of ups and downs. Today we get paid.”
Photo: AFP
At its second Summer Games competing as an independent nation, Montenegro got its first Olympic medal from a rare resource in a nation of barely 600,000 people.
“I am proud for my girls and especially, for a small country like Montenegro, it is a huge success,” coach Dragan Adzic said.
Montenegro unsettled the champion early on, but never led after Norway took its first lead midway through the first half.
Still, the champion was defied at times by inspired goalkeeping from Sonja Barjaktarovic, and Montenegro hung in even when it got into second-half foul trouble.
As Norway leaped and hugged at the final whistle, right-winger Linn-Kristin Koren hoisted a large national flag attached to a pole and led the team in a skipping run around the court.
“It’s been amazing,” said top scorer Linn Jorum Sulland, whose 10 goals on Saturday were key. “In the beginning of the Olympics we had some bad matches. I think we’ve done a really good job.”
Montenegro’s players celebrated their impressive effort by lining up in their goal area for a team photo, then linked arms around each other’s shoulders in a circle and jumped around in unison. The Balkan republic failed to win a medal at the 2008 Beijing Games, or the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
Norway appeared weighed down by expectation early on, and Barjaktarovic excelled between the posts to help hold the champion to 2-for-13 shooting.
Montenegro was also making its shots and tournament top scorer Katarina Bulatovic was perfect on 7m penalty shots. Bulatovic ended with 10 goals and 53 overall at the London Games.
Norway went ahead in the 15th minute, when Sulland’s jump shot made it 5-4. Sulland’s seventh first-half goal came right on the buzzer for a 13-10 advantage at the break.
Montenegro got into repeated two-minute suspension trouble early in the second half, and twice was reduced to playing with two women benched.
Playing with spirited energy to limit likely damage, Montenegro even outscored Norway during one four-against-six passage.
The score was leveled at 19-19, but Norway held off its underdog opponent, which continued to draw penalties right to the end.
Athletes from Montenegro formerly competed for Yugoslavia and, at the 2004 Athens Olympics, as Serbia and Montenegro.
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