Reigning 100m world champion Yohan Blake has withdrawn from next month’s World Athletics Championships in Moscow with a hamstring injury.
The 23-year-old Jamaican has been bothered by a sore hamstring since April when he competed in the Utech Classic in Jamaica.
“The injury sustained in April of this year has prevented him from attaining the necessary fitness levels that we have grown accustomed to seeing in his performances,” Blake’s agent Cubie Seegobin said on Tuesday.
Photo: Reuters
The injury also forced him to miss last month’s Jamaican trials.
Blake’s withdrawal not only robs the event of its defending sprint champion, but it adds to the list of marquee performers who have been ruled out of the event, including some for failing doping tests.
On Sunday, US sprinter Tyson Gay, former 100m world record holder Asafa Powell and Olympic gold medalist Sherone Simpson of Jamaica said they had tested positive for banned substances.
Blake has a personal best of the 9.69 seconds in the 100m making him the joint second-fastest man ever behind Jamaican teammate Usain Bolt. Gay has also run a 9.69 seconds.
Blake finished second in the 2011 Daegu World Championships, but was awarded the gold after organizers disqualified Bolt.
Defending champion Bolt was disqualified after he jumped out of the blocks too early.
Blake captured two silvers in his first Olympics at last year’s London Games in the 100m and 200m. He won gold in the 4x100m relay.
He set a personal best of 9.69 seconds in the 100m at the Athletissima Diamond League event in Lausanne, Switzerland, in August last year.
That came 11 months after he ran a personal best of 19.26 seconds in the 200m at a meeting in Brussels, Belgium.
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