Defending champion Richard Gasquet and world No. 6 Tomas Berdych will attempt to make the most of Andy Murray’s absence from this week’s Thailand Open as the battle to reach the season-ending Tour finale heats up.
The withdrawal of the Wimbledon champion, who undergoes back surgery today, is a major blow for tournament organizers, but a golden opportunity for a clutch of players seeking points to reach November’s ATP World Tour Finals in London.
Czech player Berdych is fifth in the race to London — which features the season’s top-eight players — while Gasquet is in ninth place. Canada’s Milos Raonic is also in the mix as the tour starts its Asian swing.
Photo: AFP
In the course of a breakneck few weeks, there are also events in Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai, before the players return to Europe for the final stages of the season.
Frenchman Gasquet, 27, returns to Bangkok where he lifted the trophy last year, sweeping aside compatriot Gilles Simon in the final.
The second seed will hope to carry the momentum to Thailand from a run to the US Open semi-finals, where he lost to eventual champion Rafael Nadal.
Photo: REUTERS
Raonic, ranked 11, who reached the quarters in Bangkok last year, will be hoping Murray’s absence opens the way for a genuine title shot to add to his solitary singles win this season in San Jose.
The Canadian third seed changed coaches in the spring, taking on Croatia’s former top-five player Ivan Ljubicic, who has urged his new charge to improve his all-round game, which is often overly reliant on his ferocious serve.
Since making the change, Raonic has made the final of the Montreal Masters, reached the second week of the US Open and this month played a major role in unfancied Canada’s narrow Davis Cup semi-final loss to Serbia.
“I think I’ve improved a lot of things, I’m playing quite a different way,” the 22-year-old said. “That’s the way I need to keep playing if I want to achieve what I want to achieve.”
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