Irish President Michael Higgins yesterday said that he was confident the country would have Australian support for their bid to host the Rugby World Cup for the first time in 2023.
Ireland will go up against bids from South Africa and France in the World Rugby board vote on Nov. 15 and Australia would normally be expected to back their fellow southern hemisphere power.
However, Higgins said he had heard encouraging noises from current and former Australian Rugby Union (ARU) officials on his trip to Australia.
“I’m not just optimistic, I’m more than optimistic,” the poet and academic told reporters in Sydney.
“How should I put it? Imagine I would get lost for words, which would be very unusual. Let me say the conversations have been very positive and very favorable,” he added.
ARU chief executive Bill Pulver, who announced that Ireland would play three Tests in Australia in June next year, maintained the diplomatic tone without revealing which bid his board would be backing.
Hailing the “incredibly successful job” Ireland did hosting the women’s Rugby World Cup earlier this year, Pulver said the country’s bid did not suffer by comparison with the other two on financial terms.
“It is a superb quality bid, the reality is they are up against two pretty tough competitors in France and South Africa,” he said. “The financial outcomes from a World Cup are very important as they allow World Rugby to fund the game for the rest of the four-year cycle. I can tell you the financial component of the Irish bid and the other two are all extremely robust.”
Ireland’s bid proposes using venues traditionally restricted to Gaelic sports and would also include pool matches in Northern Ireland.
Higgins said he thought hosting a major sporting event for the first time would have a huge impact on Ireland and be hugely successful if all of the country’s sports fans united behind it.
“I think it will bring a high level of participation,” he said. “It encourages fitness, it encourages character, it encourages comradeship.”
“I think those who are traditional followers of Gaelic games and those who are supporters of rugby, and all the sports, can combine to make it an exciting experience,” Higgins said. “I hope that the bid is successful and I am very happy to lend support to it.”
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