Former great Kieren Perkins was yesterday appointed head of Swimming Australia, charged with building momentum into next year’s delayed Tokyo Olympic Games.
One of Australia’s greatest distance swimmers, he won 1,500m gold at the 1992 and 1996 Olympics, while breaking numerous world records during a long career.
Perkins retired in 2000 having amassed 23 medals at international competitions, earning the distinction of being the first person to hold Olympic, world, Commonwealth and Pan Pacific titles simultaneously.
“I have a strong desire to maintain swimming’s position as Australia’s most successful Olympic sport and with only a year out from Tokyo, it’s important to keep a level of stability and focus,” he said. “We need to keep building momentum and heading into an Olympic year, there is no better opportunity to bring the sport and the country together, and inspire future generations.”
Swimming is Australia’s most prolific Olympic sport, and they have a storied rivalry with the US in the pool.
However, after a record haul of 20 swimming medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the team managed only 10 at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Perkins takes over from outgoing president John Bertrand a day after it emerged that Australia’s swimmers could be stripped of their 4x100m medley relay bronze medals from the 2012 London Olympics.
It follows breaststroker Brenton Rickard failing a retest of his eight-year-old doping samples, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Rickard, 37, described the positive test for a small amount of furosemide, a masking agent, as his “worst nightmare” in an e-mail to his former teammates published by the newspaper on Friday.
If confirmed, the entire Australian relay team — Rickard, James Magnussen, Christian Sprenger, Hayden Stoeckel, Matt Targett and Tommaso D’Orsogna — would lose their medals.
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