Lionel Mapoe’s hat-trick of tries helped the Lions cap their most successful Super rugby season with a 60-25 eight-try mauling of the Cheetahs on Saturday.
Mapoe scored twice in the first half to give the Lions a healthy lead after a competitive start to the game, and then grabbed a third as the hosts ran riot in the second period.
The result gave the promoted Lions a team record seventh win of the season, and their highest winning total.
Meanwhile, the Cheetahs were consigned to last place in the South African conference. A playoffs team last year, the Cheetahs were unchanged after beating the conference-winning Sharks last weekend, but finished an otherwise forgettable campaign with three yellow cards in the match.
The first of them was delivered by referee Marius van der Westhuizen as early as the 23rd minute when Phillip van der Walt collapsed a maul in the lead-up to Mapoe’s first try.
The loose forward’s absence cost the Cheetahs twice in two minutes as scrumhalf Ross Cronje found space around the fringe of a ruck to score, and then Mapoe rounded off a frenzied counterattack by dotting down.
The Lions went into halftime 27-13 up, but without flyhalf Elton Jantjies after he was shown a yellow card moments before the break, which helped the Cheetahs back into the game as Cornall Hendricks’ solo try put them within touching distance once more.
However, once Jantjies returned, the Lions ran away with the game.
Robbie Coetzee scored off the back of a rolling maul just seconds after Cheetahs prop Coenie Oosthuizen was sin-binned for repeated infringements in the scrum, and then the visitors also lost Johan Goosen to a professional foul in the lead-up to a Warren Whiteley try.
Fullback Andries Coetzee’s intercept try gave the Lions a 48-20 lead and, after Hendricks grabbed a second with a kick and chase, Mapoe completed his hat trick with seven minutes remaining to round off a memorable evening that put the Lions 12th in the final standings. Defeat left the Cheetahs winless on the road for the season.
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