World No. 1 Tai Tzu-ying (戴資穎) yesterday led Taiwan to gold in badminton, while roller sports athletes also topped the podium at the Taipei Summer Universiade.
Local athletes also excelled against international competition to pick up medals in weightlifting.
Taiwan’s medal tally at press time last night was 15 golds, 19 silvers and 12 bronzes to retain third place behind South Korea and Japan.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Much of the attention yesterday was on “Badminton Queen” Tai, with tickets to the events at the Taipei Gymnasium sold out.
Tai has won numerous international titles, but rarely plays major competitions at home. She missed the World Badminton Championships in Scotland to play in Taipei.
Fans cheered the loudest for Tai as she impressed with her repertoire of trick shots and led her team to 3-0 victories in the mixed team event against Thailand in the morning’s semis and Japan in the evening’s final.
Photo: Huang Yao-cheng, Taipei Times
It was Taiwan’s first gold medal in the event at a Universiade.
In her match against Japan’s Natsumi Shimoda in the final, Tai won 21-8, 21-13, while the men’s duo of Lee Yang (李洋) and Lee Jhe-huei (李哲輝) won 21-5, 21-15 against Katsuki Tamate and Kenya Mitsuhashi.
Wang Tzu-wei (王子維) beat Kenta Nishimoto in the individual men’s match of the team final 19-21, 21-17, 21-10.
The individual and doubles matches are to begin tomorrow, with the medals to be decided on Tuesday next week.
“It is a great feeling to hear fans with such enthusiastic support for our team. This is our home-field advantage,” Tai said. “The match for the men finished too fast, so I did not have enough time to warm up and had to make quick adjustments to take to the court.”
“They were good matches for me, although I made some unforced errors, but I am very happy to help Taiwan capture this gold medal,” she said.
A native of Kaohsiung, Tai is enrolled at the University of Taipei.
Earlier this year she won Taiwan’s first title at the Badminton Asia Championships in Wuhan, China.
In roller sports, Taiwan’s Liang Hsuan-Min (梁瑄旼) took gold in the women’s slalom, while Wang Chia-wei (王佳葳) won silver, with Russia’s Kristina Lysenko third.
“I spent a year working toward this gold medal and it has paid off today,” Liang said. “I have lost to Wang [Chia-wei] many times in the past, so I am really happy.”
Liang said she was grateful to her mother and those who had traveled from Tainan to support her.
Wang Chia-wei said that she was looking to improve.
“I was disappointed with the result, but I want to keep improving and use this experience toward training for competitions next month,” she said.
In weightlifting, Taiwan’s Chen Shih-chieh (陳世杰) pocketed silver in the men’s 105kg category with a snatch of 190kg and 225kg in clean and jerk for 415kg in total, while Lo Ying-yuan (羅楹湲) took the bronze in the women’s 90kg category with a snatch of 105kg and 130kg in the clean and jerk for 235kg.
In athletics, Hsiang Chun-hsien (向俊賢) cleared 2.26m to grab bronze for Taiwan in the high jump, with Germany’s Falk Wendrich winning gold and Italy’s Marco Fassinotti taking silver.
Additional reporting by Deirdre Yeo
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
Conflict with Taiwan could leave China with “massive economic disruption, catastrophic military losses, significant social unrest, and devastating sanctions,” a US think tank said in a report released on Monday. The German Marshall Fund released a report titled If China Attacks Taiwan: The Consequences for China of “Minor Conflict” and “Major War” Scenarios. The report details the “massive” economic, military, social and international costs to China in the event of a minor conflict or major war with Taiwan, estimating that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could sustain losses of more than half of its active-duty ground forces, including 100,000 troops. Understanding Chinese
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
RSS