Colombia’s Camilo Villegas rebounded from missed cuts in his past four PGA Tour starts to seize a three-shot lead at the Northern Trust Open on Thursday, while world No. 1 Jordan Spieth made a terrible start.
Villegas soared to the top of the leaderboard with an eight-under-par 63 at Riviera Country Club as Spieth spluttered to a 79 that included eight bogeys and a double on his final hole.
“I’ve shot in the 80s a couple times on Tour,” Spieth told reporters after carding his worst opening round on the PGA Tour. “In the course of a career, I imagine it’s going to happen. Just unfortunate when it actually does.”
“I just played really poorly from good positions off the tee and didn’t strike the iron shots bad either,” Spieth added. “I just overdrew it when you can’t be left and I overcut it when you can’t be right. Just bad timing.”
While Spieth sunk like a stone to near the bottom of the leaderboard, Villegas seized control with a storming back nine highlighted by four consecutive birdies before he ran up his only bogey on his final hole.
The Colombian’s nine-birdie round left him three strokes clear of 2014 champion Bubba Watson, Chez Reavie and Luke List.
World No. 3 Rory McIlroy, making his first PGA Tour start of the year, was a further stroke back with six other players after opening with a 67.
Play was suspended for the day in fading light with 14 players still out on the course, South African Tyrone Van Aswegen the best placed at four-under with two holes to complete.
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