Taiwanese para table tennis player Cheng Ming-chih won silver on Tuesday in the men’s singles event at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games.
Cheng missed the gold after losing to Tommy Urhaug of Norway 11-5, 7-11, 11-7, 7-11, 9-11 in a thrilling Class TT5 men’s singles final.
Cheng’s coach, Lin Chia-jung, said that she and Cheng trained solidly and had no time off for winter and summer vacations during the last three years of preparation for the Paralympics.
Photo: AP
“The hard training paid off,” Lin said, adding that Cheng defeated China’s Rio Paralympics gold medalist Cao Ningning in the quarter-finals and then Serbian player Mitar Palikuca in the semi-finals.
However, in the gold medal match, it was Urhaug who came out on top.
Lin said that despite the result being a bit disappointing, the two had done their best and “I am happy I get to coach him.”
Photo: AP
Cheng said it was his first medal in the Paralympic men’s singles TT5 event.
He would like to thank his coach and family for their relentless support, Cheng added.
Lin, in particular, was crucial to his success, as she trained with him a lot and helped boost his mental toughness before the games, he said.
“She has been with me for many years, and she supports me in every move I make on the court,” he added.
Cheng, 45, and fellow Taiwanese player Lin Yen-hung won a silver medal in the men’s team TT5 event at the 2016 Rio Paralympics.
However, Cheng did not win a medal at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games in 2021.
Cheng, who has played table tennis since he was a child and used to be a coach at an elementary school, became a national para table tennis athlete after losing his left leg in a car accident when he was 32.
He was on top of the International Table Tennis Federation Para Table Tennis Ranking List’s Men class 5 in 2020.
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