Belgium’s Philippe Gilbert won the final edition of the Tour of Beijing yesterday, in the shadow of the Bird’s Nest Stadium that hosted the 2008 Olympics.
Ireland’s Dan Martin, who was last year’s runner-up, again took second place overall, while 24-year-old Esteban Chaves of Colombia took third.
Garmin-Sharp rider Tyler Farrar took the green jersey for the points ranking by a single point from Slovenia’s Luka Mezgec (Giant-Shimano).
Photo: AFP
Lampre-Merida rider Sacha Modolo won a bunch sprint to take the race’s fifth and final stage, a 117km course that started at Tiananmen Square before making 12 loops of a circuit around the stadium.
“It was really nice, but still stressful for the last lap with a small gap like this,” said BMC rider Gilbert, who entered the stage with only a 3-second advantage over Martin and several sprint and place bonuses available.
“So, I took the before-last corner in a really good position, and then I saw that it was okay, because of the headwind in the last kilometer. I didn’t take any risk,” added Gilbert, the 2012 World Champion.
Photo: AFP
While Monday and yesterday’s stages took place under clear blue skies, heavy pollution earlier in the last World Tour event of the season forced Saturday’s hilly second stage to be cut short by about a quarter — a development that gave a boost to Gilbert, who is not known as a climber.
In his last professional race before retirement, French FDJ.FR rider Laurent Mangel sought to go out on a high in Beijing, breaking away from the pack with Belgium’s Tosh van der Sande (Lotto-Belisol) early on. The pair maintained a gap almost to the end, only to be swept up by the peloton inside the final kilometer.
“It was close, but we tried to make the other teams work, because we worked a lot this week,” stage winner Modolo said. “In the end, it worked out.”
“It’s a good race and it’s good to take cycling to new territories,” he added.
However, the Tour of Beijing was being run for the last time, with the organizers saying the event “has not been without difficulties.”
The event was overshadowed by some top-level withdrawals, including Tour of Spain winner Alberto Contador and World Tour No. 1 Alejandro Valverde.
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