The Hualien Probation Cup Basketball Tournament got off to a fast start with the Taiwan Mobile Cloud Leopards topping Kinmen Liquor 84-80 at the Hualien County Sports Complex yesterday afternoon.
The five-day competition, which features South Korea’s KT Sports, the Elite Talent Exchange of the US and six of Taiwan’s seven Super Basketball League (SBL) teams will also serve as an exhibition round of play for the SBL, which lifted its long-standing height limit on foreign players in an effort to boost its level of competition.
“We are very excited to host this event for the 12th year,” tournament commissioner Lin Yo-chih said at a press conference earlier this week.
Disappointing none was the opening battle between the Leopards and the Distillers, in which the Distillers rallied from as many as 22 down to fall within three of the Leopards, before falling short in the closing minutes to lose by four points.
It was a big win for Taiwan Mobile skipper Cheng Chih-lung, whose second tour at the helm will definitely be the focal point in the upcoming SBL season.
TIGERS 93, TAIWAN BEER 84
The Dacin Tigers roughed up Taiwan Beer for the second straight year in their opener of the competition with a 93-84 victory, despite an outstanding 34-point effort by Taiwan Beer newcomer Scott Merritt.
The two teams played to a 20-all draw after a hard fought first quarter, before the Cats skidded ahead by four to close out the first half with a 44-40 advantage.
Neither team really had the upper hand in the third quarter, which saw the Brew Crew halve the deficit to two before the Cats decided to shift gears with a 23-16 run in the final quarter to earn the nine-point win.
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