Spain’s Jorge Lorenzo yesterday claimed his third MotoGP world championship with victory at the Valencia Grand Prix as he withstood Yamaha teammate Valentino Rossi’s charge through the field.
Rossi climbed to fourth, despite starting at the back of the grid as punishment for kicking Marc Marquez off his bike at the Malaysian Grand Prix, but Lorenzo held off pressure from Honda duo Marquez and Dani Pedrosa to lead the race from start to finish and overcome a seven-point deficit heading into the final Grand Prix of the season, claiming the championship by five points.
Rossi cut through the back of the field with ease as he took just 13 laps to climb into fourth.
However, in doing so the Spanish trio of Lorenzo, Marquez and Pedrosa had built up an unassailable 11 second lead that only grew in the second half of the race.
Marquez remained glued to Lorenzo’s back wheel for the majority of the race, while Pedrosa made a late charge on the penultimate lap, but the battle between the two Hondas for second place eased the pressure ever so slightly on Lorenzo as he secured his seventh win of 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
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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