Viktor Ahn of Russia easily advanced to the 500m men’s short track speedskating quarter-finals at the Sochi Games yesterday, putting him in position to become the first skater to win an Olympic gold medal in all four individual short track events.
South Korea-born Ahn made it safely through his heat, cheered loudly by the mostly Russian crowd at the Iceberg Skating Palace in Sochi, Russia. He won his adopted country’s first gold in the sport in the 1,000m and earned a bronze in the 1,500m after becoming a Russian citizen in 2011.
In Heat 7, Taiwan’s Mackenzie Blackburn failed to qualify for the quarter-finals after finishing third with a time of 42.337. The 21-year-old trailed first-place finisher Olivier Jean of Canada and JR Celski of the US, who came second. Celski, who was fourth in the 1,500m, was the lone American to advance in his last individual event.
In the biggest surprise of the day, Charles Hamelin of Canada was leading on the last lap of his heat when he crashed into the pads after apparently catching a blade in the turn. He won gold in the 1,500m on the first day of short track in Sochi.
Hamelin’s crash cleared the way for Sjinkie Knegt of the Netherlands to win the heat. Knegt won his country’s first short track medal when he took bronze in the 1,000m last weekend.
Among other skaters moving on to Friday’s quarter-finals were Park Se-yeong and Lee Han-bin of South Korea, Wu Dajing, Liang Wenhao and 1,500m silver medalist Han Tianyu of China, and Vladimir Grigorev of Russia, the silver medalist in the 1,000m.
In other Sochi news, Pussy Riot collective members Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said they were detained on suspicion of theft yesterday, less than two months after being released from prison under an amnesty.
Both women said on Twitter that police forcefully threw them into a van, with Tolokonnikova saying they had been accused of theft and Alekhina adding that they were questioned without their lawyers present.
“At the time of our detention, we weren’t engaged in any protests, we were walking around Sochi. WE WERE WALKING,” Tolokonnikova wrote on Twitter.
Lawyer Alexander Popkov told reporters that about 30 to 40 officers had arrested between 12 and 15 people, including Alekhina and Tolokonnikova.
The women were in Sochi with other Pussy Riot members to record a musical film called Putin Will Teach You To Love The Motherland, Tolokonnikova said.
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