BASEBALL
Duo seek lenient sentences
A sports agent and a baseball trainer are seeking lenient prison sentences after their convictions in Miami of smuggling Cuban players into the US. Court records filed this week showed that agent Bartolo Hernandez is asking for a three-year prison term and trainer Julio Estrada wants no more than five years. They were convicted by a jury in March after a six-week trial. Prosecutors are asking a judge to exceed the nine-year maximum for both calculated under federal sentencing guidelines. Sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 2. Trial evidence showed the pair ran an international operation to smuggle Cuban players in return for a cut of their lucrative baseball contracts.
BASKETBALL
James ruled out with injury
LeBron James will not play again in the pre-season because of a sprained left ankle and his status for the Cleveland Cavaliers’ season opener is in question. James aggravated his ankle while making his exhibition debut on Tuesday night against Chicago. He scored 17 points and had eight turnovers as the Cavaliers fell to 0-4. He did not practice on Wednesday and coach Tyronn Lue said the four-time Most Valuable Player would not practice yesterday or play in today’s pre-season finale at Orlando. The Cavs open the regular season on Tuesday next week against the Boston Celtics and former Cleveland guard Kyrie Irving. Lue was noncommittal when asked if James would be ready for the game, saying: “I’m not sure.” James is “pretty mad” about the injury, he added.
SOCCER
Panama declares holiday
Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela declared a national holiday to celebrate at the Central American country’s first-ever qualification for the FIFA World Cup. “It’s a historic day for the country. Tomorrow [Thursday] will be a national holiday for public and private-sector workers,” Varela said on Twitter on Wednesday. Panama on Tuesday came from behind to beat Costa Rica 2-1 and book a ticket to Russia 2018. The victory left them third in regional qualification behind Mexico and Costa Rica, and sensationally helped knock the US out of contention. Thousands of Panamanians celebrated long into the night in the capital, Panama City, as a cacophony of car horns greeted the historic news. “Today the planets aligned, you must never lose faith,” Varela said on the Estadio Rommel Fernandez pitch in the capital following the match.
TENNIS
Garcia qualifies for Finals
Frenchwoman Caroline Garcia became the eighth and final player to qualify for the season-ending WTA Finals in Singapore after Britain’s Johanna Konta withdrew from the Kremlin Cup in Moscow due to a foot injury, the WTA said yesterday. Garcia won back-to-back titles in Wuhan and Beijing, beating Simona Halep in the Beijing final to move past Konta in the Race to Singapore rankings at the start of this month, but withdrew from the Tianjin Open with an injury. Her withdrawal gave Konta an outside chance of qualifying for the Oct. 22 to Oct. 29 event, although she would have had to reach the Moscow finals to overtake Garcia. “Qualifying for the WTA Finals in Singapore means the world to me,” Garcia, who will be making her first-ever singles appearance at the event, told the WTA Web site.
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