China’s top-ranked Liu overlooked for Rio

Ginn laments Australia’s eights flop at Rio trial

BEIJING, May 26, (Agencies): China have slammed the Olympic door shut on women’s table tennis world number one Liu Shiwen, saying she’s too inconsistent for the Rio Games.

Liu, 25, paid the price for a shock defeat at the Asian qualifying tournament in April, when she was stunned by Hong Kong’s Doo Hoi-kem.

Olympic title-holder Li Xiaoxia will defend her women’s singles title, while world champion Ding Ning beat Liu to the second spot in China’s team.

The snub means that Liu will have to watch from afar as dominant China seek their third straight clean sweep at the Olympics in August.

“The defeat in the Asian regional qualifier was a pity for me,” she said, according to Xinhua news agency.

“Of course it’s not that by winning the (qualifying) title I would definitely be able to participate, but if I had played a bit better, the possibility of participating would have been even greater.”

It echoes a similar situation at the 2012 Olympics, when China controversially left out the popular Ma Long after a dip in form before the London Games.

China have an embarrassment of riches in table tennis, and after winning 24 gold medals at seven Olympics, they can afford to be selective.

According to the International Table Tennis Federation, quoting China’s women’s coach Kong Linghui, Liu missed out because of her defeats to foreign players, while Ding got the nod because of her “consistent good performance”.

Three-time Olympic gold medallist Drew Ginn has blamed Australian rowing for a “tradition of secrecy” in its selections after the men’s and women’s eights failed to qualify for the Rio de Janeiro Games.

Needing a top-two finish at the final Olympic qualification regatta in Switzerland, the men’s eight finished fourth, with the women third.

The failure of the men’s eight was particularly galling for Australia’s rowing community, given the country’s record of qualifying for the event in every Olympics dating back to the 1952 Helsinki Games.

Ginn, Australia’s most successful Olympic rower, said the eights crews had paid the price for being treated as an afterthought by selectors.

“I’ve got no doubt the they would have given the very best account of themselves, the guys and the girls, but we keep making mistakes in the sport which are repeated,” the 41-year-old said in quotes published by The Australian newspaper on Thursday.

Two-time Olympic 100 metres champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce will return to competition at Saturday’s Prefontaine Classic in Oregon after missing her three previous scheduled meetings with a toe injury, her coach has said.

It will be Fraser-Pryce’s first individual race after a toe injury forced her to withdraw from a meeting in Jamaica on May 7 and Diamond League meetings in Shanghai and Rabat also this month.

“She is training, albeit not as ideally as she would like,” her coach Stephen Francis told Television Jamaica on Wednesday.

“But she is back in training and has been for the last week and a half and she has to go to Prefontaine this weekend, so we’ll see what happens.

“I think she will run at the Racer (on June 11) and that is where we expect her to be back to full form, so hopefully her toe will play along and cooperate.

“But I think she will be ready to compete ... it’s just that she has a lot of pain when she does train, but now I think we have found a way around it and in another three to four weeks she will be ready to go.”

The 2008 and 2012 Olympic champion is bidding to become the first woman to win the 100 metres title at three successive Games.

Americans Gail Devers (1992/96) and Wyomia Tyus (1964/68) are the only other women to have won backto-back Olympic 100m titles.

The race to Rio is playing out all over the globe with athletes competing for coveted spots.

On the LPGA Tour, the competition among a slew of talented South Korean players to compete in Olympic golf this summer is particularly intense.

“To think someone could be the ninth best player in the world, but might not be able to make the Olympic team from Korea, that’s pretty amazing,” LPGA Tour Commissioner Mike Whan said Wednesday.

If the team was set now, that would happen because no more than four players from a country can play.

Ha Na Jang is No. 9 in the world ranking, but trails four fellow South

Amy Yang of South Korea putts on the seventh hole during the second round of the Kingsmill Championship presented by JTBC on the River Course at Kingsmill Resort on May 20 in Williamsburg, Virginia. (AFP)

Koreans: No. 2 Inbee Park, No. 4 Sei Young Kim, No. 7 In Gee Chun and No. 8 Amy Yang.

Jang, who hasn’t played in an LPGA Tour event in a month, is not in the field this week in the inaugural Volvik Championship at Travis Pointe Country Club. And, she isn’t expected to return until the KPMG Women’s PGA in two weeks.

Jang’s break might be tied to an attention-grabbing situation in Singapore on the way to the HSBC Champions. Her father lost control of a traveling bag that tumbled down an escalator and hit Chun in the lower back, forcing her to withdraw from some events. Jang then won the tournament and moved ahead of Chun in the ranking, bumping Chun to fifth among South Koreans.

Chun has forgiven Jang’s father, saying it was simply an accident, but her parents didn’t seem to be happy with Jang’s apology.

On the course, the competition creates another source of drama.

So Yeon Ryu is among five more South Koreans ranked between Nos. 11 and 21.

“It’s hard to get into the Olympics for Koreans because so many great players within the top 15,” said Ryu, who is ranked No. 11. “It is better than to think about my golf rather than to keep an eye on each other.” That’s probably wise. It also might be the right thing to say, allowing veterans such as Se Ri Pak, who plans to retire after this year, to be more forthcoming about the first chance a golfer has had to be an Olympian since 1904.

Joshua Kimmich, whose meteoric rise has earned him a spot in Germany’s preliminary Euro 2016 squad, says he wants to compete at the Olympics if he misses the cut for next month’s tournament in France.

The versatile 21-year-old midfielder has had a sensational debut season at Bayern Munich, who won the domestic double, and is one of several youngsters picked by Germany coach Joachim Loew for a pre-European Championship training camp in Italy.

Loew will cut four players by May 31 before submitting his 23-man squad for the tournament that starts on June 10.

“It is an option and I would like to take part in the Olympics...it is in the back of your mind,” Kimmich told reporters on Thursday. “But here at the training camp you only think about the Euros.”

The Rio de Janeiro Olympics run from Aug 5-22 with national football teams made up of mostly under-23 players.

Often clubs do not release their players for the Games and the Bundesliga season starts only four days after this year’s Olympics.

Kimmich said he was surprised to receive his Euro call-up despite getting regular praise from Bayern coach Pep Guardiola who deployed him as a holding midfielder, centre back and left and right back.