This year’s Taiwan Strait Tournament opened at the Taipei Physical Education College Gymnasium in Tianmu yesterday with the Yulon Luxgens edging the Taiwan Mobile Cloud Leopards in a 71-68 thriller.
Lu Cheng-rue’s three-pointer with 33 seconds remaining turned a one-point deficit into a two-point lead for the Luxgens, as they held off a late-game rally by the Leopards to escape with a narrow victory.
Also starring for the Luxgens were Chou Shih-yuan and Chen Shan-mei, whose 33 combined points accounted for nearly half of the score posted by a Yulon squad whose top priority this season is to revamp an inside attack after the departure of all-star center Tseng Wen-ding to the Chinese Basketball Association.
Photo courtesy of the CTBA
The Leopards are looking to build on last season’s success with newcomer Luke Nevill from Australia and skipper Cheng Chih-lung said he was relatively pleased with his team’s performance, despite the loss.
“We accomplished our goal for the game, which was to test-run some offensive and defensive schemes with the new guys in the lineup,” Cheng said after the game.
Nevill led all scorers with 21 points and 11 rebounds in a double-double effort for his new team.
NEW CENTURY 85, PURE YOUTH 80
Pure Youth Construction were no match for the visiting Dongguan New Century in their tournament opener, dropping a tight decision to start the exhibition season on a sour note.
Newly acquired three-point threat Chen Tzu-wei made a big splash in his Pure Youth debut by leading the defending Super Basketball League champs with 16 points.
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