Huang Liang-chi beat Daniel King-Turner in straight sets in the Davis Cup yesterday to secure Taiwan’s place in Group I of the Asia/Oceania Zone.
Taiwan, leading 2-1 after the first two days in Kaohsiung, only needed a win from Huang in yesterday’s opening rubber to clinch the best of five tie. The world No. 372 duly delivered, dispatching his opponent 6-3, 7-6 (7/3), 6-1, to condemn New Zealand to relegation to Group II.
Next year Taiwan will again play in Group I, one level below the elite World Group.
New Zealand’s Artem Sitek beat Yang Tsung-hua 6-1, 7-6 (7/3) in yesterday’s final rubber, which was rendered meaningless by Huang’s victory.
Having lost the first two singles matches on Friday, New Zealand kept the tie alive on Saturday when King-Turner and Jose Statham beat Hsieh Cheng-peng and Huang 3-6, 7-6 (7/4), 6-1, 6-4 in the doubles.
Yang beat King-Turner 4-6, 6-0, 6-3, 7-6 (7/2) in the opening singles match on Friday before Huang defeated Michael Venus 6-4, 7-6 (7/0), 6-3 in the second.
The victory was Taiwan’s first against New Zealand in the Davis Cup and followed three defeats, the last of which was in 1995.
Meanwhile, Hsieh Su-wei, Taiwan’s top woman tennis player, confirmed yesterday that she has qualified for one of the Women’s Tennis Association’s (WTA) two year-end climax tournaments for the first time.
The world’s No. 25 made the information public by posting a photograph on Facebook of an e-mail she had received from the International Tennis Association, informing her of her qualification for the US$750,000 round-robin event, which is scheduled to start in Sofia, Bulgaria, on Oct. 30.
The annual event is a competition between six of the highest-ranked players, who won an international level tournament this year, but did not qualify for the season-ending WTA Championships in Istanbul. Russian Maria Kirilenko and Bulgarian Tsvetana Pironkova have also gotten a wildcard entry into the event.
Hsieh, a Kaohsiung native, set a new milestone for Taiwan’s women’s tennis when she broke the ranking record of former Taiwanese tennis player Wang Shi-ting in 1993, who was then ranked 26th.
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