AS Monaco recovered from a goal down to win 2-1 at 10-man OGC Nice, as the principality club started their Ligue 1 campaign in solid fashion in an ill-tempered game on Saturday.
Nice were reduced to 10 men on the stroke of half-time when Olivier Boscagli was sent off before Bernardo Silva and Layvin Kurzawa turned things around after Valere Germain’s early opener.
Promoted Angers SCO are the early league leaders after Abdoul Razzagui Camara and Gilles Sunu gave them a 2-0 win at Montpellier Herault, while Olympique de Marseille lost 1-0 at home to Stade Malherbe Caen.
At Nice’s Stade du Ray, Germain, on loan from Monaco, opened the scoring with a close-range half-volley after seven minutes, before Nice lost Boscagli in the 45th minute for a second yellow card.
Stephan El Shaarawy, on loan from AC Milan, was brought on shortly before the break, but it was Bernardo Silva who leveled, as he coolly slotted home eight minutes into the second half.
Defender Kurzawa’s 64th-minute header then smashed against the bar, but the ball bounced back into his path and this time he nodded it into the net.
In other Ligue 1 games, SC Bastia defeated visitors Stade Rennais 2-1, Nantes secured a 1-0 home victory against En Avant de Guingamp, while Gazelec Ajaccio registered a goalless draw away to ESTAC Troyes.
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