BADMINTON
Taiwanese duo make final
Taiwan’s Lee Yang and Wang Chi-lin yesterday advanced to the final of the men’s doubles at the Gwangju Korea Masters after winning their semi-final 21-16, 21-13 against South Korean pairing Kim Won-ho and Park Kyung-hoon. Lee and Wang won in 32 minutes at Gwangju Women’s University and face Shem Goh and Tan Wee-kiong of Malaysia in today’s final. There was no other success for Taiwanese on the penultimate day. In the mixed doubles, Yang Po-hsuan and Hu Ling-fang lost 12-21, 15-21 to Tang Chun Man and Tse Ying Suet of Hong Kong, while Lee Jhe-huei and Hsu Ya-ching lost 17-21, 17-21 to Goh and Shevon Jemie Lai. In the women’s doubles, Hsu and Hu lost 19-21, 16-21 to Nami Matsuyama and Chiharu Shida of Japan.
TABLE TENNIS
Lin Yun-ju advances
Taiwan’s Lin Yun-ju reached the semi-finals at the T2 Diamond Singapore yesterday with a 4-2 win over Patrick Franziska of Germany. Lin faces either Japan’s Jun Mizutani or Lin Gaoyuan of China for a place in the final, with both games to be played today. After losing the opening game of the quarter-final 10-11, Lin won three on the trot before the time rules pushed the match into “fast five” conditions. Lin dropped the first of those 1-5, but claimed the second 5-2 to end the contest. “I was a bit unsettled during the first game, but I became more decisive as the match wore on,” Lin told T2diamond.com. “I got into rhythm and just followed the game plan that my coach and I set out. I don’t feel a lot of pressure and am getting used to this setting,” he said of the tournament’s match format.
RUGBY UNION
Tonga given Cup lifeline
Tonga’s women’s rugby team have been given another opportunity to qualify for the 2021 World Cup after the side were withdrawn from the Oceania Rugby Women’s Championships in Fiji and quarantined this week following a measles outbreak. The outbreak has killed at least six people in Samoa and spread across the Pacific islands, with the Tongan Ministry of Health last week there confirming that were more than 250 confirmed cases of the disease. The decision to quarantine the team was made by Fijian health officials and the WHO. The Oceania championships, which began on Monday and are to conclude on Sunday next week, doubled as a qualifying tournament for the World Cup in New Zealand, with the winners advancing directly to the global showpiece. The second-placed team would enter a repechage tournament. However, World Rugby said that Tonga would now play the third-placed team from the Oceania tournament with the winners advancing to a match against the side finishing second. The winners of that game would play in the repechage tournament.
SNOWBOARDING
Jake Carpenter honored
Snowboarders on Friday glided down a Vermont mountain as a tribute to Jake Burton Carpenter, a pioneer in the sport who died this week. Carpenter, who founded Burton Snowboards, died on Wednesday of cancer complications. He was 65. Burton Snowboards chief executive officer John Lacy encouraged employees to do “what Jake would be doing” on Friday, “and that’s riding.” So they did, taking to the slopes at Stowe Mountain Resort in the rain. They packed onto chairlifts and met at the top for a ceremony at the stone hut, a special place for Carpenter. Then they rode down together. “It’s been a tough couple of days, but there’s nothing better than being together with Jake’s big family,” said Ian Warda, who works at Burton Snowboards.
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