This morning, 20 teams participating in the Tour de Taiwan, the island's premier bicycling event, will struggle through Stage Five of the race: 148.3km around Hsinchu. It's the most grueling stretch of the competition.
As of press time, Giant Asia Racing Team was in the lead, but with four stages left it's still anybody's race. Tomorrow, the racers are scheduled to arrive in Taipei County and will complete the race with two final stages in Taipei City.
The Tour de Taiwan has been moving north throughout the week. The race started in Kaohsiung, looped through Pingtung and then headed to Changhua, Taichung and Hsinchu on the east coast.
PHOTO: CNA
Tour de Taiwan is part of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) Asian Tour and since 2006 has been integrated into the Taipei Cycle Show, organized by Taiwan External Trade Development Council (see story above).
With five local teams, out of 20, the event is a major training ground for local cyclists who have ambitions to join the international circuit. There are also teams from Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Canada, the UK, US, Holland, South Korea and Australia.
During the event, Taiwan promotes its cycling industry. This year, both Giant and Merida, Taiwan's largest cycling manufacturers have teams: longtime rivals Merida Europe and Giant Asia Racing Teams. While both feature international stars, they also give locals a chance to show their potential.
The total race covers 800km, with both road race and circuit elements. Saturday's race around the Nangang Exhibition Center also highlights the important role played by Taiwan in the production of top-end cycling components.
For those who want to watch the races, the fifth stage will be setting out from the plaza in front of the Hsinchu City Government building (新竹市政府前) at 9am today. The 127.7km leg in Taipei County will set off at 10am tomorrow from the plaza in front of the Taipei County Government building in Banqiao, cross the Guandu Bridge and finish at the same location. Racers are expected to complete the leg around 1pm. The seventh stage is a circuit race around the Taipei Cycle Show at the Taipei World Trade Center Nangang Exhibition Hall (台北世界貿易中心南港展覽館), which covers a distance of 58km. It starts at 9:30am in front of the main entrance to the exhibition hall. The event concludes on Sunday with 60 laps around Taipei City Government building, along Songgao (松高路), Songzhi (松智路), Songshou (松壽路) and Shifu roads (市府路), starting at 10am.
Updated information can be found at the Tour de Taiwan Web site at www.khhtri.org.tw/tourdetaiwan.
The Taipei Times reported last week that housing transactions fell 15.3 percent last month, to under 20,000 units. However, the market boomed for the first eight months of the year, and observers expect it to show growth for the year as a whole. The fall was due to Central Bank intervention. “The negative impact of credit controls grew evident for the third straight month,” said Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) research manager Tseng Ching-ter (曾敬德), according to the report. Central Bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) in October said that the Central Bank implemented selective credit controls in September to cool the housing
During the Japanese colonial era, remote mountain villages were almost exclusively populated by indigenous residents. Deep in the mountains of Chiayi County, however, was a settlement of Hakka families who braved the harsh living conditions and relative isolation to eke out a living processing camphor. As the industry declined, the village’s homes and offices were abandoned one by one, leaving us with a glimpse of a lifestyle that no longer exists. Even today, it takes between four and six hours to walk in to Baisyue Village (白雪村), and the village is so far up in the Chiayi mountains that it’s actually
It’s a discombobulating experience, after a Lord of the Rings trilogy that was built, down to every frame and hobbit hair, for the big screen, to see something so comparatively minor, small-scaled and TV-sized as The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The film, set 183 years before the events of The Hobbit, is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists. Rohirrim, which sounds a little like the sound an orc might make sneezing, is perhaps best understood as a placeholder for further cinematic
The results of the 2024 US presidential election rattled the country and sent shockwaves across the world — or were cause for celebration, depending on who you ask. Is it any surprise then that the Merriam-Webster word of the year is “polarization?” “Polarization means division, but it’s a very specific kind of division,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, in an exclusive interview ahead of Monday’s announcement. “Polarization means that we are tending toward the extremes rather than toward the center.” The election was so divisive, many American voters went to the polls with a feeling that the opposing candidate was
RSS