ARCHERY
Taiwan team take bronze
A team from Taiwan yesterday won bronze after beating a team from Singapore 227-226 in the compound women’s team event in Stage 3 of the Asia Cup World Ranking Tournament in Singapore. Lin Ming-ching, Hsu Yen-hua and Lo Yi-hsuan won the bronze medal playoff at Bukit Gombak Stadium. The Asia Cup compound event uses a total points system. Archers in each set shoot a total of six arrows (two for each competitor). After four sets, the team with the highest score wins. In the recurve women’s team event, Taiwan’s Sui Yun-ching, Su Hsin-yu and Li Tsai-chi finished fourth after losing 0-6 to a team from China in the bronze medal playoff.
MOTOR RACING
Rossi wins at Le Mans
Retired motorcycling legend Valentino Rossi’s switch from two wheels to four moved up a gear at Le Mans on Friday. The seven-time MotoGP world champion has his heart set on competing in next year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans in the GT3 class. The 44-year-old Italian got a first-hand look at the iconic Circuit de la Sarthe behind the wheel of a BMW for W Racing Team in the Road to Le Mans support race. Finishing second with his teammate Jerome Policand, the duo were declared the winners after the car in front picked up a penalty. “We had the speed, a good balance — that was fun,” said Rossi, stepping off the podium.
MOUNTAINEERING
Norwegian eyes record
A Norwegian woman yesterday climbed Mount Manaslu in Nepal, her ninth highest mountain in 45 days and is on track to become the fastest mountaineer to climb the world’s 14 tallest peaks in three months, a hiking official said. Kristin Harila, 37, scaled Manaslu, the world’s eighth-highest at 8,163m with Tenjen (Lama) Sherpa and five other guides before dawn. She climbed Shishapangma in Tibet on April 26 and has since completed Dhaulagiri, Kanchenjunga, Everest, Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu and Annapurna. She next heads to Pakistan to climb Nanga Parbat, Gasherbrum I, Gasherbrum II, K2 and the Broad Peak, local sponsors said. Harila hopes to finish climbing all 14 peaks taller than 8,000m some time next month and if successful she would set the fastest climber record by beating Nirmal Purja from Nepal, who completed the peaks in six months and one week in 2019.
SOCCER
Beijing goes mad for Messi
Superstar Lionel Messi yeserday arrived in Beijing by private jet and was greeted by hundreds of jubilant fans, with his FIFA World-Cup-winning Argentina set to face Australia in a friendly match next week. “Messi, Messi,” chanted several hundred fans who were waiting for him at the airport, many wearing the blue-and-white striped jersey of the Albiceleste’s No. 10, photographs on social media showed. Several hundred others waited outside his hotel, not far from the banks of the Liangma River. World champions Argentina are to play a friendly against Australia on Thursday next week at Beijing’s newly renovated 68,000-capacity Workers’ Stadium. By mid-day, the arrival of global sporting superstar Messi was the most talked-about topic on Sina Weibo. The friendly marks the return of international soccer to China, after three years of strict COVID-19 restrictions.
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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