Girondins de Bordeaux and LOSC Lille Metropole missed their chance to cut the gap on French league leaders Olympique de Marseille when they could only manage dull draws on Saturday.
Marseille would move five points clear if they could make it five wins in five matches this campaign with a success at winless AS Nancy-Lorraine yesterday — though Olympique Lyonnais would expect to keep the margin down to two points by beating AC Ajaccio at home.
Though they remain unbeaten, Bordeaux, the six-time Ligue 1 champions, missed out on the chance to leapfrog big-spending Paris Saint-Germain and Lyon after they could only manage a goalless draw at Valenciennes to stand fourth — three points off the pace.
Lille missed a chance to move into the top five when they were also held, 1-1, at ES Troyes AC, who thanked a late equalizer from Sebastien Grax for a point which leaves Lille winless since the opening day of the season.
Dimitri Payet had put the northerners ahead in the 38th minute, but Grax pegged them back with a neat right-footed effort to frustrate the visitors four days before they take on BATE Borisov of Belarus in the UEFA Champions League.
With no Champions League distractions, Marseille and Lyon could put the pressure on if they won their encounters yesterday and the riches of Europe’s premier club competition could be a poisoned chalice for the likes of PSG and reigning French champions Montpellier Herault.
At least PSG will relish their opening match against Dynamo Kiev after Friday’s 2-0 win over Toulouse.
In contrast, Montpellier sold France striker Olivier Giroud to their opening European opponents Arsenal, while in the league nothing is going right after Friday brought a third league defeat in five games — a 3-1 reverse at Stade de Reims.
In Saturday’s other matches, Sochaux-Montbeliard managed their first points of the new season with a 1-0 win at former giants AS Saint-Etienne, OGC Nice swatted Stade Brestois 29 4-2 in a midtable battle and modest Evian Thonon Gaillard bagged their first win — 3-0 at home to SC Bastia — to climb out of the drop zone.
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