ATHLETICS
Iran sports boss quits
The head of Iran’s athletics federation resigned on Sunday over a sporting event featuring women without the mandatory headscarf, state media reported, as the country toughens enforcement of hijab rules. “Hashem Siami resigned from his post due to the controversies that arose from the endurance [running] race organized in Shiraz,” the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) said. According to images from Friday’s competition published by Iranian media, some women were running without headscarves. Local organizers of the public event have also been summoned to provide “explanations,” the provincial prosecutor said in a statement on Sunday. Siami told IRNA that he was not involved in organizing the competition and that the unveiled athletes were not part of the national federation.
BASEBALL
Pitching legend Blue dies
Vida Blue, a hard-throwing left-hander who became one of baseball’s biggest draws in the early 1970s and helped lead the brash Oakland Athletics to three straight World Series titles before his career was derailed by drug problems, died on Saturday, the team said. He was 73. Blue died at a hospital in San Francisco of medical complications stemming from cancer, the team said. He had used a walking stick to assist his movement at a 50th anniversary of the 1973 A’s championship team on April 16. “He was engaging. He was personable. He was caring,” ex-teammate Reggie Jackson said on Sunday. “He was uncomfortable with the crowd.” Blue was voted the 1971 American League Cy Young Award and Most Valuable Player (MVP) after going 24-8 with a 1.82 ERA and 301 strikeouts with 24 complete games, eight of them shutouts. He was 22 at when he won MVP, the youngest to win the award. He remains among just 11 pitchers to win MVP and Cy Young in the same year.
SAILING
Australia win third title
Tom Slingsby and his Australian crew on Sunday clinched this season’s SailGP Championship in San Francisco Bay, notching up their third straight win, and with it another US$1 million prize. A dominant Australia held off a last-minute surge from runner-up Peter Burling’s New Zealand in the three-boat final, with Ben Ainslie’s Emirates Great Britain trailing in behind in what has been billed as sailing’s answer to Formula One. “We got ourselves right back in there at the end. We dug deep. We didn’t give up and we kept fighting, and I’m gutted to not pull it off, but you have to hand it to the Aussies, they are incredible,” Burling said.
GOLF
Thailand blank Australia
Thailand on Sunday captured the LPGA International Crown, blanking Australia 3-0 in the championship match to complete a near-perfect run in the global team event at Harding Park in San Francisco. Patty Tavatanakit defeated Hannah Green 4&3 and Atthaya Thitikul beat Stephanie Kyriacou 4&2 in singles to clinch the trophy before Ariya and Moriya Jutanugarn downed Minjee Lee and Sarah Kemp 4&3 in foursomes to complete the sweep. “It means a lot for all of us,” Thitikul said. “It’s incredible work we put in this week to get this trophy for our country.” She added: “We’re one of the best teams in the world and I think we can beat every team in the world.”
North Korea’s FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup-winning team on Saturday received a heroes’ welcome back in the capital, Pyongyang, with hundreds of people on the streets to celebrate their success. They had defeated Spain on penalties after a 1-1 draw in the U17 World Cup final in the Dominican Republic on Nov. 3. It was the second global title in two months for secretive North Korea — largely closed off to the outside world; they also lifted the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup in September. Officials and players’ families gathered at Pyongyang International Airport to wave flowers and North Korea flags as the
Taiwan’s top table tennis player Lin Yun-ju made his debut in the US professional table tennis scene by taking on a new role as a team’s co-owner. On Wednesday, Major League Table Tennis (MLTT), founded in September last year, announced on its official Web site that Lin had become part of the ownership group of the Princeton Revolution, one of the league’s eight teams. MLTT chief executive officer Flint Lane described Lin’s investment as “another great milestone for table tennis in America,” saying that the league’s “commitment to growth and innovation is drawing attention from the best in the sport, and we’re
Coco Gauff of the US on Friday defeated top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka 7-6 (7/4), 6-3 to set up a showdown with Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen in the final of the WTA Finals, while in the doubles, Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching was eliminated. Gauff generated six break points to Belarusian Sabalenka’s four and built on early momentum in the opening set’s tiebreak that she carried through to the second set. She is the youngest player at 20 to make the final at the WTA Finals since Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki in 2010. Zheng earlier defeated Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejcikova of the Czech Republic 6-3, 7-5 to book
For King Faisal, a 20-year-old winger from Ghana, the invitation to move to Brazil to play soccer “was a dream.” “I believed when I came here, it would help me change the life of my family and many other people,” he said in Sao Paulo. For the past year and a half, he has been playing on the under-20s squad for Sao Paulo FC, one of South America’s most prominent clubs. He and a small number of other Africans are tearing across pitches in a country known as the biggest producer and exporter of soccer stars in the world, from Pele to Neymar. For
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