The US’ Chloe Dygert on Saturday broke the 3,000m individual pursuit world record twice on her way to gold at the World Track Cycling Championships as she took her second gold of the week.
The 21-year-old was in a class of her own in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, as she demolished Dutch favorite Annemiek van Vleuten, the world road time trial champion, in a one-sided final.
She had broken Olympic teammate Sarah Hammer’s record in qualifying earlier and lowered it again in the final.
Photo: AFP
Kelly Catlin, who won gold alongside Dygert in the team pursuit, took the bronze medal.
Hosts the Netherlands also had to make do with silver in the women’s madison won in superb style by British duo Katie Archibald and Emily Nelson.
Nelson was only drafted in after Eleanor Barker’s crash in the omnium the previous day, but proved up to the task as her and Archibald won eight successive sprints to finish 15 points ahead of the Dutch duo of Kirsten Wild and Amy Pieters.
Wild had been going for her third gold of the week.
For Nelson it was a first world title, having won silver with Barker in the madison last year in Hong Kong.
“It’s going to take a while for that to sink in,” she said. “It was really hard to see the scoreboard, so I just kept going as though people were one point behind us.”
In the men’s sprint final, Australia’s Matthew Glaetzer beat Britain’s Jack Carlin 2-0.
Carlin merely hoped to make the quarter-finals in his first World individual sprint race, and had to compose himself on the podium.
“I was very close to throwing up,” he said. “Throwing up during the Australian national anthem probably wouldn’t have gone down very well ahead of the Commonwealth Games [next month].”
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
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