German veteran Alex Cejka sank a 15-foot birdie putt at the first extra hole for victory in a five-way playoff at the Puerto Rico Open on Sunday.
The 44-year-old outlasted US players Jon Curran, Tim Petrovic and Sam Saunders and Argentine Emiliano Grillo to seal the win.
They all finished at seven-under-par 281 at the Trump International course in Rio Grande to force the first five-man playoff on the PGA Tour since Phil Mickelson won the 2006 BellSouth Classic.
Curran and Grillo both bogeyed the par-five 18th in regulation to fall into the playoff.
Cejka, who shot a closing 69, collected US$540,000 for his first win on the PGA Tour.
“The first victory is always the toughest, so I’m glad it’s done,” Cejka told reporters, admitting he was surprised that Curran and Grillo both butchered the 72nd hole.
“I had everything ready to go to the airport and almost was very satisfied with a third-place finish,” he said.
“Suddenly it changed, and here I am. And I’m very, very pleased. I don’t think I’m going to sleep tonight,” Cejka said.
A four-time winner on the European Tour, he endured a 12-year global drought before winning on the secondary US-based Web.com tour last year.
“At least I can say I played PGA Tour for a long time and I won. That’s a good sentence I can use when I retire,” he said.
Cejka started the final round strongly, with four birdies in the first six holes, but did not pick up another stroke the rest of the way, with his lone bogey coming at the par-three 11th.
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