Taiwanese table tennis player yesterday Tien Shiau-wen won the nation’s first medal at the Tokyo Paralympic Games: a bronze in the women’s singles class 10 event.
The 21-year-old first-time Paralympian began the day with a 3-1 victory against Merve Cansu Demir of Turkey in the quarter-finals.
In the semi-finals, she met the bronze medalist at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, Bruna Costa Alexandre of Brazil.
Photo courtesy of the Kaoshiung Sports Development Bureau
Tien won the first game 14-12, but Costa Alexandre came back to clinch the following three games 11-6, 12-10 and 11-7, winning the match and securing herself a place in the gold medal match scheduled for tomorrow.
Tien’s coach, Tsai Kuei-lan, on Friday said that Tien exceeded expectations when she won all three of her group matches, and she never showed the stage fright that many athletes experience when competing in their first major event.
Tien was the only one of the four Taiwanese table tennis players to reach a medal match at the Tokyo Games, after three others were eliminated on Friday.
From Wednesday, she is to compete in the women’s class 9-10 team event with Lin Tzu-yu.
Class 6-10 are standing classes in table tennis at the Paralympics, while class 1-5 are sitting classes for players in wheelchairs.
Taiwan sent of 10 athletes to the Tokyo Paralympics and several of them have finished competition, including a six-time Paralympian, 45-year-old powerlifter Lin Ya-hsuan, who finished seventh in the women’s under-61kg weight class.
Also yesterday, 30-year-old Liu Ya-ting finished sixth in the women’s standing javelin final with a distance of 32.44m, her best of the season.
In swimming, 19-year-old Chen Liang-da is to race today and tomorrow.
With badminton matches to begin on Wednesday, 22-year-old Fang Jen-yu is to compete in the men’s singles SU5 event for athletes who can stand, but have an upper limb impairment.
Former European champions Celtic exited the UEFA Champions League in the qualifiers after a 3-2 penalty shoot-out defeat at Kazakhstan’s Kairat Almaty on Tuesday, following two goalless legs in the playoff tie. Kairat are to compete in the competition proper for the first time, while Norway’s Bodo/Glimt and Cyprus’s Pafos also secured debut appearances after coming through the playoffs. Celtic’s night ended in disappointment as they missed three penalties in the shoot-out, Daizen Maeda failing with the decisive spot-kick. The slugfest of a match went into extra-time with neither side finding the net and few overall chances, echoing the first
Rangers on Wednesday bowed out of the UEFA Champions League playoffs with a humiliating 6-0 defeat at the hands of Club Brugge which piles further pressure on head coach Russell Martin, while SL Benfica secured a place in the competition proper at the expense of Jose Mourinho’s Fenerbahce. The Glasgow giants traveled to Belgium right up against it after losing 3-1 at home in last week’s first leg, when they conceded three times in the opening 20 minutes. They never looked like turning the tie around as Club Brugge took the lead inside five minutes at the Jan Breydelstadion through Nicolo Tresoldi
Noah Lyles on Thursday warmed up for the upcoming athletics world championships by chasing down Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo to win the 200m at the Diamond League final. Lyles trailed Tebogo at the start, but gradually erased the deficit over the final 100m and pipped the Botswana sprinter to the line by centimeters. Lyles, the Olympic 100m champion and reigning world champion in both the 100m and 200m, clocked 19.74 seconds in a slight headwind. Tebogo was 0.02 seconds behind. It was Lyles’ sixth Diamond League title, a record for track athletes. “Six, that’s a big number,” Lyles said. “Shoot, that’s another record on
Mitch Brown finally had enough as he watched unfolding coverage of yet another case of homophobic abuse in the Australian Football League (AFL), and decided it was time to change the narrative. Brown contacted the Daily Aus with a message that the online news site published yesterday: “I played in the AFL for 10 years for the West Coast Eagles, and I’m a bisexual man.” In almost 130 years of top-flight competition in Australia’s homegrown football code, no past or active male player had publicly identified as bisexual or gay. Aussie Rules was a long way behind other types of