Apr 10
South Africa beat Australia by 25 runs and take a 2-1 lead in the one-day series after Australia’s top order struggle again.
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Mar 29
Britain’s Jenson Button wins the Australian Grand Prix ahead of team-mate Rubens Barrichello to mark a stunning debut for the new Brawn GP team while McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton finishes third.
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Mar 20
South Africa take on Australia in Cape Town in the final game of a three-Test series.
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Mar 20
Four wickets from Dale Steyn helps South Africa to a great start as they bowl Australia out for 209 on the first day of the third and final Test.
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Mar 19
South Africa take on Australia in Cape Town in the final game of a three-Test series.
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Mar 19
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Tiger Woods will make his first appearance Down Under in over a decade after the world number one agreed to play at this year’s Australian Masters.
Mar 11
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Yosvani Peraza belted a two-run homer in the eighth inning to help Cuba rally for a 5-4 victory over an upset-minded Australia on Tuesday, the win securing a spot in the World Baseball Classic second round.
Mar 10
Australia wrap up the series with South Africa with a Test to spare thanks to a 175-run win in Durban.
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Jan 05
Former world number one Ana Ivanovic kicked off her 2009 season ahead of the Australian Open with victory over Petra Kvitova at the Brisbane International.
Serbian Ivanovic, 21, who reached the Australian Open final last season, overcame the Czech 6-4 6-2 to set up a second-round match with Roberta Vinci.
Another former world number one Amelie Mauresmo also opened with a win in the ATP-WTA Australian Open tune-up event.
The Frenchwoman edged past Australia’s Jelena Dokic 7-6 (11-9) 7-6 (7-5).
The victory will provide a welcome boost for Mauresmo, whose ranking has slipped to 24 from a high of number one in 2006 when she won two Grand Slam titles.
She has been working with new coach Hugo Lecoq since failing to finish in the top 20 last year – the first time in a decade.
But she had to fend off two first-set points before overcoming Dokic, who herself has slumped in the rankings to 177th from a career high of number four.
“It was a tough first match – she was playing some good tennis and gave me a bit of trouble,” Mauresmo said. “But there were good things. Physically I felt good on the court. That’s a key point for me.”
It was a lot more comfortable for Ivanovic, who ended last season at five in the rankings following an injury-hampered mid-season.
“The end of last season was a bit of a disappointment for me so I was looking forward to a good start,” she said.
Three seeded players suffered an early exit, though, with fourth seed Daniel Hantuchova of Slovakia beaten 6-7 (1-7) 6-4 6-0 by Italy’s Sara Errani.
Italy’s number eight seed Francesca Schiavone also fell, ousted 7-5 6-2 by Olga Govortsova of Belarus, and Ai Sugiyama of Japan, seeded ninth, was defeated 6-2 6-3 by home favourite Samantha Stosur.
Italy’s Vinci beat Germany’s Anna-Lena Groenefeld 0-6 6-3 6-1 to earn her place in the second round.
source: bbc.co.uk
Jan 04
Defending Australian Open champion Maria Sharapova has withdrawn from a Hong Kong exhibition tournament because she is still recovering from a shoulder injury just weeks ahead of the first Grand Slam of the year.
The three-time Grand Slam winner started playing tennis again just over two weeks ago and isn’t in proper condition, organizers of the Jan. 7-10 Hong Kong event said in a statement on their Web site Wednesday.
“I’m just not ready to play against the top-class competition in Hong Kong, although I remain hopeful for Australia where I’m the defending champion,” Sharapova said in a statement.
The Australian Open is Jan. 19 to Feb. 1.
“Maria needs to get ‘tennis fit’ now and she’s working hard,” Sharapova’s agent, Max Eisenbud, said.
Sharapova has not played competitively since pulling out of the Rogers Cup at Montreal in late July after beating Poland’s Marta Domachowska in a nearly three-hour match in which she double-faulted 17 times.
The Russian was examined by a trainer midway through the three-set victory and withdrew from the event before her next match.
Jan 04
John Daly smashed one tee shot off the top of a beer can during a pro-am. At another tournament, he returned from a rain delay with Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Jon Gruden as his caddie. And his most memorable photo this year came in an orange jail suit, eyes half-closed.
Daly said Wednesday that such unwelcome publicity is why the PGA Tour suspended him for six months.
The two-time major champion confirmed his suspension to The Associated Press, calling this the low point of an 18-year career during which he has made as much news off the course as he has with his prodigious game.
“Is it fair that I got suspended?” he said. “It’s not fair in reality, but it’s probably fair in perception.”
Daly said he wanted to go public to let fans and tournaments know that he wasn’t abandoning them by taking his game to the European tour. At least until the spring, he simply didn’t have much of a choice.
“I’m not sure this is the smartest thing to do, but I’d rather be honest, especially with the fans,” he said. “It’s hard for me not to play on the West Coast. I love it out there.”
PGA Tour spokesman Ty Votaw declined comment, even after seeing Daly’s remarks, citing the tour’s longtime policy of not discussing fines or suspensions.
This is the second time the tour has suspended Daly, along with at least two other times when he agreed to sit out the final few months of a season to get his life in order.
He has not played on the PGA Tour since he missed the cut Oct. 17 in Las Vegas. Ten days later, police in Winston-Salem, N.C., said he appeared intoxicated outside a Hooters restaurant, and Daly was taken to jail to sleep it off. That led to his photo in the orange jail suit, which became an Internet sensation.
Dec 28
IT’s a strange world in which Michael Phelps can win a record eight Olympic gold medals and still be challenged for pre-eminence in the year of the Beijing Games.
But a bolt from the blue Caribbean, in the shape of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, managed to drag the spotlight from the Water Cube to the Bird’s Nest, as two of history’s greatest athletes framed the Games of the XXIX Olympiad.
International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge declared the two men the “icons of the Games”.
In a record-breaking year for records, the pair were also the foremost exponents of the art of going where no athlete has gone before.
Appropriately for the first Olympics staged in China, Phelps and Bolt represented the Yin and Yang of great champions — the swimmer and the runner, water and earth, a diet of 12,000 calories a day versus chicken nuggets for breakfast. Phelps lit up the Games by day (thanks to NBC’s insistence on morning finals in the pool) and Bolt by night.
But where Phelps’ triumphant march was expected, even demanded (NBC was counting on it), Bolt’s sudden rise to superstardom was a joyous gift for his troubled sport, beset by doping scandals which had tarnished its credibility along with some once-great names.
It takes a huge talent to hold 90,000 people in thrall but Bolt captured them at the Bird’s Nest from the moment he dashed down the straight to win the 100m in a world record 9.69sec, becoming the fastest man on the planet, despite a side-stepping celebration over the last 20m that may have cost him up to 0.1sec.
But Bolt’s Calypso rhythm and youthful exuberance brought much-needed star quality to the main stadium.
The only time that 21-year-old Bolt was deadly serious was when he stepped onto the blocks for the 200m final. A 200m specialist as a junior competitor, he was desperate to break his hero Michael Johnson’s lauded world record of 19.32sec from Atlanta in 1996.
Bolt ran the half-lap with his eyes only on that mark and every fast-twitch fibre straining forward, stopping the clock in an astonishing 19.30sec.
And he wasn’t finished there. The showman of the Games then combined with former world 100m record-holder Asafa Powell and his Jamaican team-mates to set a third world record in the 4x100m relay.
His name was attached to three of the five world records to fall at the Bird’s Nest.
If Bolt was the king of the track, Russia’s Yelena Isinbayeva was the queen of the air, after she soared to a world record of 5.05m in the pole vault to clinch her second successive Olympic gold medal.
Dec 28
Relish the memories – 2008 was a special year for sport, and the outlook for the next few does not appear half so rosy.
Next year is thin in terms of big international events. The World Athletics Championships take place in Berlin, and it is left to rugby union – a minority sport globally – to provide another highlight when the British and Irish Lions tour South Africa, the world champions. And further ahead, the successor hosts of two of this year’s stellar events, the Olympic Games and the European Football Championships, have hard acts to follow, with fewer resources and the global economic crisis to combat.
The Beijing Olympics was the apex of 2008. China opened its doors to the world and demonstrated that it could organise a successful sporting extravaganza. It did so by hurling massive amounts of money and manpower at the Games, in a manner that perhaps only an authoritarian state could. The yin and yang nature of the event was symbolised by the happiness and pride of the Chinese people at hosting the world’s biggest sporting party on the one hand, and their government’s refusal to budge an inch over human rights on the other.
Oct 17
International golf officials have used Adelaide as their meeting ground to plot the sport’s Olympic bid.
Australia and other around 70 other nations contesting the world amateur teams championships in Adelaide have been implored to lobby International Olympic Committee (IOC) members for golf’s inclusion at the 2016 Games.
Golf is among seven sports vying to compete at the Olympics – the others being baseball, karate, roller sports, rugby sevens, softball and squash.
The IOC will announce the two inclusions in October next year.
International Golf Federation officials in Adelaide have asked national amateur body officials asking to keep the Olympic bid in mind.
Oct 08
Vanoc predicts 2010 Olympic Games sellouts despite the economy.
Organizers of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics say demand for tickets is so strong that more events than expected will go to lottery and all events will sell out.
“Our confidence that we will sell out all of our tickets by the time the Games come has gone up,” said Dave Cobb, executive vice-president of marketing, revenue and communications for the Vancouver organizing committee.
Those predictions come despite a softening economy and forecasts of a recession in Canada and the United States.
Cobb said Vanoc is not worried about the downturn, saying initial tracking on its website shows strong demand.
And even if people change their buying habits, Vanoc is still confident it will sell out all of its tickets, he said.
The total number of people requesting tickets may decline – or people may decide to buy less expensive tickets than they would have had the economy not been struggling – but “the numbers are still well beyond what we need to sell out the Games,” Cobb says.
Oct 04
Traffic to the 2010 Winter Olympics website stayed at 10 times its normal levels Friday as tickets to the Games went on sale for the first day.
Organizers wouldn’t release the number of applications they received for tickets, but said people were making the requests as well as just looking for information.
When sales began early Friday morning, organizers said they saw a massive spike in activity, but it levelled off by the end of the day.
“We had about 30 times our normal volume when we turned it on first thing this morning,” said Caley Denton, the Vancouver Olympic committee’s vice-president of ticketing and consumer marketing.
Demand for the estimated 1.6 million tickets publicly available tickets was steady from all across Canada, he said.
Sales around the world are managed by the various national Olympic committees, many of whom have contracted out the process to agents.
For the United States, Australia and the European Union, sales are being handled by a company called CoSport, which with its sister company JetSet are the official suppliers of hospitality packages to the Olympics.
Oct 02
Michael Phelps who claimed a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympic Games said it was harder for him to learn Chinese than to win swimming races.
Before the American came to China for the 2008 Games he seriously took a few Chinese lessons. A popular online video shows how hard he tries to imitate the voice of a Chinese learning multimedia software in saying such basic words as “guo zhi” (juice), “nan hai’er” (boy) and “nu hai’er” (girl).
But still, the 23-year-old rated his Chinese language studies as the most difficult thing he had tried in his life. “Learning Mandarin is even harder than winning eight gold medals in the pool.”
In primary school Phelps took French and German courses, but the swimming ace said, “all the words, characters and pronunciations in Mandarin are so different. All of them are hard to manage.”
He was not the only star athlete trying to learn some Chinese language and culture. When gymnast Nastia Liukin arrived back home in Dallas, Texas, with five medals around her neck, the Russian-born blonde appeared in front of her reception wearing a black T-shirt with two big Chinese characters “Beijing” in the front. (blog)
“The Beijing Olympics have brought world attention to the Chinese civilization and further enhanced the utility of the Chinese language worldwide,” said Zhao Guocheng, the Office of Chinese Language Council International (OCLCI) deputy director general.
Oct 01
Hong Kong – Hong Kong saw its tourist numbers plunge by tens of thousands in August despite hosting the Olympic equestrian events, officials admitted Tuesday. Visitor arrivals to the former British colony in August were 2.67 million, or 2.9 per centm, less than in 2007, the Hong Kong Tourism Board announced.
The city of 6.9 million had originally hoped for a bumper summer thanks to overseas interest in the Olympic Games but months before the games hoteliers were reporting a dramatic fall-off in bookings.
Officials travelled around the world to promote Hong Kong as an Olympics destination but ironically the fall in tourist arrivals was steepest in areas where equestrian sports are strongest.
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