SWIMMING
S Korea arrests KSF official
South Korean prosecutors have arrested another official from the Korea Swimming Federation (KSF) as part of a widening investigation into corruption, Yonhap News reported yesterday. Prosecutors arrested a federation board member late last month amid allegations he took hundreds of thousands of US dollars from coaches to influence the selection of national team athletes. Prosecutors yesterday arrested an official from the federation’s Mokpo office in South Jeolla Province and seized computer hard drives and documents from the branch office, Yonhap said. The arrests come after the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism last month announced it was cutting off funding to several federations amid concerns about corruption.
SOCCER
Games can be moved: UEFA
UEFA said European Championship games could be moved to different venues in France and played without fans on another day in response to terror attacks or threats. The contingency plans were formulated after suicide bombers tried to enter the Stade de France during a France friendly against Germany in November last year. They detonated devices outside the stadium as part of a coordinated attack on Paris that left 130 dead. The following week, a Germany-Netherlands friendly was canceled just before kickoff after police suspected that an explosive device could be detonated at the Hannover stadium. Yesterday marked 100 days until the UEFA European Championship and France’s state of emergency remains in place.
FOOTBALL
Broadcast most fruitful: CBS
Most of the advertising revenue from major sporting events is to continue to come from broadcast and cable, not streaming, CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said on Tuesday. Even as more and more fans watch sporting competitions streamed over their smartphones, tablets and computers, CBS still expects traditionally broadcast Sunday afternoon football games to be its most lucrative time slot, McManus said. That will not change with streaming any time soon, he told the Leaders group’s Sports Business Summit in New York. “The fact of the matter is the NFL gets the lion’s share of its revenue from broadcast television and from basic cable television,” McManus said. “I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of games broadcast exclusively streaming on sites like Yahoo, Netflix or Google,” he said. “The lion’s share of the audience and the lion’s share of the revenue is always going to be, at least for the foreseeable future, on broadcast television.”
BASEBALL
Obama to attend Cuba game
US President Barack Obama plans to attend the Tampa Bay Rays’ exhibition game in Cuba on March 22. US Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting Ben Rhodes on Tuesday released the news on Twitter after Major League Baseball and the players’ association announced arrangements had been finalized for the game against Cuba’s national team in Havana. It is to be MLB’s first trip to the island nation since the Baltimore Orioles played there in 1999. The game is to be televised by ESPN and ESPN Deportes. US teams played spring training games in Cuba before Fidel Castro’s revolution, but none appeared there from March 1959 until the Orioles faced Cuba’s national team in Havana in March 1999.
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