Taiwan’s top female tennis players will be fighting it out this week for the OEC Taipei Ladies Open title at the Taipei Arena.
Top seeds Chan Yung-jan and Hsieh Su-wei will be joined by, among others, US Fed Cup player Vania King and leading Japanese trio Ayumi Morita, Rika Fujiwara and Aiko Nakamura at the US$100,000 ITF event that starts tomorrow.
Chan, ranked 74th in the world, will be seeking her first singles title of the year after reaching the final of the WTA event in Strasbourg in May.
IN FORM
Hsieh will be looking to maintain the form that has seen her win ITF titles in Tsukuba, Japan, last month and in Incheon, South Korea, in April. She also reached the last 16 of the Australian Open in January, the best ever singles performance by a Taiwanese player at a Grand Slam event.
The 22-year-old from Taipei has reached a career high singles ranking of 82nd this month.
Other Taiwanese players in the 32-strong field for the singles competition include Chan Chin-wei, Chang Kai-chen and Hwang I-hsuan.
TITLE CHALLENGE
King is likely to be one of the main challengers for the title. The 19-year-old was a member of the US team that lost their semi-final clash to eventual Fed Cup winners Russia in April. Although she was born in California, King should feel at home in Taipei as she is a Mandarin-speaking daughter of Taiwanese-born parents.
Other contenders include 19-year-old Morita, who broke into the world top 100 in April, and her Japanese Fed Cup teammates Fujiwara and Nakamura.
Another player in with a chance of doing well is Jessica Moore. The 18-year-old won the ITF Rome-Tevere Remo singles title in July and is currently the third-ranked player in Australia, behind Samantha Stosur and Casey Dellacqua.
Taiwan’s Chou Tien-chen yesterday exited at the BWF World Tour Finals in China, losing in the semi-finals to China’s world No. 1 Shi Yuqi. Shi, who was named the BWF Men’s Singles Player of the Year, had a 9-4 record against Chou going into the match. He extended that record to 9-5 with a 21-14, 21-18 victory. Chou advanced to the men’s singles semi-finals on Friday by upsetting top-seeded Anders Antonsen of Denmark in a must-win match at the Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center Gymnasium. The 16-21, 21-18, 21-15 victory saw Chou secure his second semi-finals appearance at the tournament, despite his relatively older
India’s chess star Gukesh Dommaraju returned to a hero’s welcome in his home city yesterday after becoming the youngest world champion aged only 18. Hundreds of fans crowded the arrivals area of Chennai International Airport, cheering alongside banks of television cameras as Gukesh made his way out of the airport after victory in taking the World Chess Championship title. “It means a lot to bring back the trophy to India,” Gukesh told reporters, with garlands of flowers draped around his neck, brandishing the glittering trophy in his hand. “I can see the support and what it means to India, I
Indian teenager Gukesh Dommaraju became the youngest chess world champion on Thursday after beating the defending champion Ding Liren of China in the final match of their series in Singapore. Dommaraju, 18, secured 7.5 points against 6.5 of his Chinese rival in the contest, surpassing the achievement of Russia’s Garry Kasparov, who won the title at the age of 22. The Indian teen prodigy has long been considered a rising star in the chess world after he became a chess grandmaster at 12. He had entered the match as the youngest-ever challenger to the world crown after winning the Candidates tournament earlier
China yesterday jailed former English Premier League star and China men’s national coach Li Tie for 20 years for bribery, snaring one of the country’s greatest soccer figures in a sweeping government crackdown on corruption in sport. Chinese President Xi Jinping has waged an unrelenting campaign against deep-seated official corruption since coming to power more than a decade ago. Anti-graft authorities took aim at the sport industry in 2022 and have announced a string of convictions for former soccer administrators this week. In the highest-profile case to date, a court in Hubei Province yesterday said that Li had been sentenced to “fixed-term imprisonment
RSS