Taiwanese badminton ace Tai Tzu-ying yesterday missed out on her fourth title of the season, losing the Korea Open women’s singles final 21-9, 21-15 to South Korean defending champion An Se-young.
Despite the straight-games loss at Jinnam Stadium in Yeosu, South Korea, the 29-year-old Tai still recorded her best performance in the BWF Super 500 event, winning US$15,960 as runner-up.
World No. 2 An defeated world No. 4 Tai in 38 minutes, for the Taiwanese’s seventh loss to An in the nine matches they have played.
Photo courtesy of Badminton Photo
Tai’s only victory in her five matches against An this year was during the Badminton Asia Championships final in Dubai on April 30.
This year, An, 21, has reached at least the semi-finals in nine of 10 international tournaments and won six titles, failing to reach the last four only at the Indonesia Open last month.
This week, Tai, who in April announced she was to retire at the end of this season, is to open her Daihatsu Japan Open campaign with a round-one match against Canada’s Michelle Li.
Photo courtesy of Badminton Photo
Tai, who is seeded fourth in the BWF Super 750 event, has defeated Li in nine of their 11 matchups, most recently 18-21, 21-13, 21-11 at the Toyota Thailand Open on Jan. 22, 2021.
The Tokyo tournament starts tomorrow and carries a total prize purse of US$850,000. Singles winners stand to take home US$59,500.
The qualifying round of the World Baseball Classic (WBC) is to be held at the Taipei Dome between Feb. 21 and 25, Major League Baseball (MLB) announced today. Taiwan’s group also includes Spain, Nicaragua and South Africa, with two of the four teams advancing onto the 2026 WBC. Taiwan, currently ranked second in the world in the World Baseball Softball Confederation rankings, are favorites to come out of the group, the MLB said in an article announcing the matchups. Last year, Taiwan finished in a five-way tie in their group with two wins and two losses, but finished last on tiebreakers after giving
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
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
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
RSS