BASEBALL
Otani out for six weeks
Japanese baseball player Shohei Otani will be sidelined for about six weeks because of a left thigh muscle strain, his team said yesterday. Otani, who is expected to move to Major League Baseball next year, hurt his left leg trying to beat out an infield single in the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters’ loss to the ORIX Buffaloes on Saturday. The injury will add further debate to Otani’s insistence on batting as well as pitching.
SWEDEN
Athletes honor attack victims
Athletes competing in soccer, ice hockey and swimming have observed a minute of silence for the victims of Friday’s deadly truck attack in Stockholm. Swedish media showed teams and supporters in the country’s top soccer leagues, in the highest division hockey league and at a swimming event standing silently shoulder-to-shoulder before commencing competition. Dennis Fredriksson of the Swim Stockholm Open 2017 competition told Swedish broadcaster SVT that participants “were all quite shaken by what had happened,” but it was “obvious to all” not to give in and cancel. Soccer players with the Allsvenskan and second-tier Superettan divisions were wearing black arm bands during weekend games.
SOCCER
Sydney FC use video referee
Sydney Football Club received a helping hand from a video assistant referee in a world first on Saturday, but it was still not enough for a 20th win of the season for the runaway A-League leaders. The A-League is trialing the video assistant over the final two rounds of the regular season and the three weeks of playoffs that follow. The video assistant was called into action in the second half of their match against Wellington Phoenix Football Club in Wellington, when Sydney FC claimed Marco Rossi had handled the ball inside the box.
BOXING
Lomachenko beats Sosa
Vasyl Lomachenko dominated Jason Sosa before recording a ninth-round technical knockout to defend his World Boxing Organization junior lightweight belt and complete a three-fight Ukrainian sweep on Saturday night. Lomachenko (8-1, 6 knockouts), a two-time Olympic champion who is considered among the world’s best fighters, looked close to knocking out Sosa (20-2-4) on several occasions before Sosa’s corner stopped the fight. Fellow Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk (12-0) defended his WBO cruiserweight title with a 117-110 unanimous decision over Mike Hunter (12-1) in opener of an HBO fight card and the maiden event at the MGM National Harbor in Washington.
GOLF
Spieth needs resilience to win
Jordan Spieth yesterday used the same grit and resilience he needed after a back-nine meltdown last year to rally from a 10-stroke deficit into Masters contention once again. The 2015 Masters and US Open champion fired a four-under par 68 on Saturday to share fourth place with fellow Americans Ryan Moore and Charley Hoffman after 54 holes to stand on four-under 212, two back of coleaders Justin Rose and Sergio Garcia. “Kind of the way this year has been, slow starts and just grind it out to come from behind,” said Spieth, who won at Pebble Beach earlier this year. “I’ve come back and won tournaments before, all the way from six back on the PGA Tour, so I can draw off those experiences.” After an opening 75 that featured a quadruple bogey at the 15th, Spieth was 10 strokes off the lead.
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