Annie Last yesterday won gold in the women’s mountain biking at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in Australia, finishing 48 seconds ahead of England teammate Evie Richards on the hinterland Nerang State Forest course.
Last finished the demanding 27.6km course in 1 hour, 18.02 seconds, with Richards taking silver in 1 hour, 18.50 seconds. Hayley Smith won the bronze in 1 hour, 20.26 seconds, just ahead of another Canadian, Emily Batty.
In later finals, teams from Australia and Canada were meeting in both the men’s and women’s beach volleyball gold medal matches, and the track program featured a marquee 200m matchup between Olympic sprint champions Elaine Thompson — who won the 100m and 200m gold at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics — and Shaunae Miller-Uibo — who won the 400m gold in Rio.
Photo: Reuters
In morning preliminaries at the track, two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya continued her quest for a 800m and 1,500m double when she posted the fastest time in the heats of the shorter race. The South African flag bearer won the 1,500m in a Games record time earlier in the week and won the first of three 800m heats in 1 minute, 59.26 seconds.
Alexandra Bell of England and Eglay Nalyanya of Kenya posted personal bests to finish second and third in the heats. Kenya’s Margaret Nyairera Wambui, the Olympic bronze medalist, advanced as the winner in the second heat in 2 hours, 00.60 seconds.
Valerie Adams kept alive her bid for a fourth Commonwealth Games gold medal in the shot put when she posted the leading mark of 18.52m in the preliminaries.
DOPING
Games’ officials conducted more than 3,000 drug tests ahead of the Games in an effort to weed out athletes who might be cheating well ahead of their competitions.
Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority chief executive David Sharpe said 2,600 tests were conducted on Australian athletes and 500 more on international athletes, some of whom were only at the qualifying stage for the Games.
The testing led to pre-Games sanctions for some athletes.
The Commonwealth Games Federation medical commission doctor Mani Jegathesan said doping samples from athletes at the Games would be stored for 10 years to be available for retesting.
Drug testing authorities took into account the “risk element” and used intelligence reports so that “every test counts,” Jegathesan said.
Officials would not say how many tests were being conducted during the Games.
ATHLETES MISSING
A men’s squash pairing from Sierra Leone are the latest athletes to miss their event at the Games. Sierra Leone’s Ernest Jombla and Yusif Mansaray did not appear yesterday for their doubles match. Their absence meant India’s Ramit Tandon and Vikram Malhotra got a walkover in Pool F.
Games officials confirmed a Rwandan athlete, two Ugandans and potentially one Ghanaian had also left the village without notifying team officials and their whereabouts was unknown.
Cameroon officials earlier revealed eight members of the 42-person squad had gone missing, including two boxers who failed to appear for their events.
“We’re obviously looking at it very carefully,” Games Federation chief executive David Grevemberg told reporters.
“We have a service to people who have legitimate visas to be in this country,” he said. “Until it becomes a true issue and somebody has outstayed their visa, or have formally applied for asylum, we just need to continue to monitor the situations.”
“The focus now is to support teams in trying to track down the athletes who are missing,” Grevemberg added.
Additional reporting by AFP
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