Australia’s Jay McCarthy grabbed the overall lead in the Tour Down Under cycle race from compatriot Caleb McEwan when he won yesterday’s second stage of the season-opening WorldTour event.
McCarthy claimed the arduous 132km stage from Unley to Stirling in a close finish from Italy’s Diego Ulissi, who was a winner of the equivalent stage on the 2014 tour.
A crash 1,000m from the finish split the leading group and took several riders out of contention, including Simon Gerrans, a former tour winner.
Gerrans picked up five seconds of time bonuses on intermediate sprints earlier in the stage and hoped a further bonus from a top-three finish would put him close to the lead on general classification.
After the crash he limped home two minutes behind McCarthy, but because it occurred within 3km of the finish, he was credited with the same time as the winner. That lifted him to third place overall.
McCarthy’s win gave him a four second lead on general classification over Ulissi who is two seconds ahead of Australia’s Rohan Dennis with Patrick Bevin of New Zealand in fourth place.
Wednesday’s stage featured five laps of a 20km circuit through Stirling and a steep uphill finish. The stage contained more than 3km of climbs which were especially testing in warm temperatures and high humidity. It proved too much for some riders, including first stage winner Ewan, who dropped away with about 5km to go.
McCarthy, who rides for the Russia-based Tinkoff team, is not a renowned sprinter, but had identified the Stirling stage as a winning opportunity.
“It was a tough day of racing around Stirling, it always is,” McCarthy said. “I had the chance to go for the GC this week as well. It’s great to come out and get the victory today, but my week’s not finished so now I have to go back, recover and hopefully prepare for tomorrow’s stage over the corkscrew.”
Today, the riders will race 139km from beachside Glenelg to Campbelltown in the Adelaide Hills, over the Corkscrew climb in the third of the race’s six stages.
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