San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
WU’S MAKING ATP HISTORY
Yibing Wu became the first Chinese player to reach an ATP Tour final, rallying for a three-set victory over topseeded American Taylor Fritz in the Dallas Open on Saturday night.
Wu will play John Isner, who also won after dropping the first set and advanced to the final of his hometown event with a victory over fellow American J.J. Wolf.
Wu won 6-7 (3), 7-5, 6-4 and survived all nine break points he faced, including five when down a set and trailing 2-1 in the second. Fritz had 20 aces to Wu’s six, but Wu capitalized on two of his four break chances.
Wu broke Fritz to take a 6-5 lead in the second set before breaking the eighth-ranked Fritz, highest among Americans, for a 3-2 lead in the deciding set.
Fritz, the San Diego native who reached the semifinals at Wimbledon but was coming off a disappointing secondround exit at the Australian Open, had only been broken once in the tournament before facing Wu.
Wu made history last summer as the first Chinese man to reach the third round of the U.S. Open, doing so as a qualifier. The unseeded 23-year-old is seeking his first title, with Isner going for his 17th.
Isner, who became the first tour player with 500 career victories in tiebreakers in the quarterfinals, outlasted Wolf 3-6, 7-5, 7-6 (4) to clinch a spot in his 31st career final.
Locally
The San Diego State women’s basketball team (20-7, 10-4 MW) cruised to an 80-55 win at San Jose State (3-21, 112) to earn its 20th win of the year, the most since the 201213 season. Sophia Ramos had 16 points and a career-high 13 assists, the most assists by an Aztec in 10 years.
• The PLNU basketball programs swept a pair of games from Concordia. The men (23-3, 18-0 Pacwest) celebrated their Pacwest title with a 97-80 win. Brian Goracke scored a career-high 32 points, while Luke Haupt posted a triple-double of 16 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists. The women (14-12, 12-6) extended their season-high winning streak to six games, beating the second-place team, 56-55. Haylee Saurette had 15 points.
• Kelsey Forrester scored 25 points and the No. 15/RV Cal State San Marcos women’s basketball team (19-3, 16-2 CCAA) recorded its second consecutive come-frombehind victory to extend its win streak to six games with an 82-71 victory over visiting Stanislaus State (6-18, 2-16). The men’s team (15-8, 14-4) earned a berth in the CCAA tournament for the second consecutive season as it led wire-to-wire in its 85-54 victory over Stanislaus State (915, 7-11) at home.
• San Diego State blew past Memphis (0-4), 7-1, on the third day of the SDSU Season Kickoff at SDSU Softball Stadium. The Aztecs (3-1) scored a season-high seven runs on 11 hits on offense.
• The University of San Diego women’s basketball program (15-10, 9-5 WCC) rode a sensational performance from Ayanna Khalfani (23 points, nine assists) to a 75-63 victory over Pepperdine (8-17, 3-12) at home.
• The CS San Marcos baseball team (4-3) earned its first series win of the season with a 15-9 victory over Montana State Billings (3-3) in the first game of a doubleheader before falling 5-1 in the series finale at home.
• The San Diego Gulls dropped a 6-1 AHL decision at Bakersfield. The Gulls scored first but then the Condors tied it 10 seconds later and the rout was on.
• Three days after seeing their 30-game MASL regularseason winning streak end, the San Diego Sockers (11-1) got back in the win column by a 6-3 count at the Tacoma Stars.
Soccer
Vinicius Junior scored twice and assisted Karim Benzema to lead Real Madrid to its record-extending eighth Club World Club title. They beat Saudi Arabia’s Al-hilal 5-3 in the final in Rabat.
• The first cracks are appearing in Arsenal’s English Premier League title bid, right before the team’s biggest match of the season. A 1-1 draw at home to Brentford came a week after a lackluster 1-0 loss at Everton. It’s hardly the run of results the leader will have wanted heading into the big one on Wednesday when second-place Manchester City comes to Emirates Stadium. Six points separate the teams though City can reduce that when the defending champion hosts Aston Villa today.
Winter sports
Swiss skier Jasmine Flury won gold in the women’s downhill at the world championships on a rough day for the pre-race favorites. Flury edged Austrian skier Nina Ortlieb by 0.04 seconds for her first career medal at major championships. Swiss teammate Corinne Suter came 0.12 behind to take bronze.
• Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara became the first Japanese pairs skaters to win the Four Continents Figure Skating Championships when they overcame a couple of mistakes in their free skate to easily win the title. They scored scored 137.05 points for a total of 208.24, easily outdistancing the American team of Emily Chan and Spencer Akira Howe. Chan and Howe vaulted to the silver medal with 201.11 points while Canadian champions Deanna Stellato-dudek and Maxime Deschamps struggled to a third-place finish with 193.84 points.
Dear Car Talk:
We all have seen pictures of wrecking yards with stacks of crushed, rusting cars. What happens when those cars are EVS with large batteries installed?
— Roger
They won’t have batteries in them, Roger. The batteries — even very used batteries — are too valuable to crush.
Regardless of age, batteries have anodes and cathodes that contain rare earth metals like lithium, cobalt and nickel. Those metals are really expensive. A recent price check lists a single ounce of lithium as selling for $16,500. An ounce of nickel is $22,000. An ounce of cobalt will set you back $33,000.
The metals are also hard to get. They require carbonintensive mining. And many of them now come from China, which presents certain national security, energy independence and even human rights concerns.
So, a big industry — or what the players hope will become a big industry — is getting started. There’s a company called Redwood that’s spending billions of dollars to build factories that recycle old batteries and use them to make new anodes and cathodes, which they’ll sell to EV battery manufacturers. I’m sure other companies will join in as well.
So, you’d better believe that any EV that arrives at a junkyard is going to have its battery pack removed before it gets crushed.
And the truth is, that’s what happens with all cars, even those with internal combustion engines.
When a car arrives at a junkyard at the end of its useful life, there are many parts on it that can be sold and reused.
So junkyards remove all the valuable stuff — everything from the radiator to the steering rack to the window cranks — and even then, they often leave the cars lying around the yard for a while just in case someone needs a right side mirror housing for a ’98 Dodge Neon.
Once the car has been fully stripped of its useful parts, only then does its shell go to the crusher. Then the scrap metal is put on a boat and sent to Malaysia where it returns to the U.S. as selfie sticks.