RP shooter, archer still in contention as Games begin

MANILA, Philippines – There is still a glimmer of hope for Filipino shooter Eric Ang and archer Mark Javier as they continue their arduous task of making it into the next round of their respective events in the 29th Beijing Olympic Games. Ang and Javier, the country’s lone bets in their respective sports, began the Philippines’ campaign Saturday. Ang will try to fight for survival when the final two rounds of the men’s trap will be played Sunday at the Beijing Shooting Range Clay Target Field while Javier is set to face Chinese-Taipei’s Kuo Cheng Wei at the Beijing Olympic Archery Range. Ang, who blamed opening-day jitters for his poor performance, placed 30th in a field of 35 shooters in the first day of men’s trap preliminaries. He shot 65 out of 75 birds after the first three rounds to find himself virtually out of the running with still two rounds left. Ang, 37, needs to score a perfect 50 in the last two rounds that will be played Sunday and pray the next 30 shooters ahead of him in the standings “shoot very, very poorly’’ to make it to the championship round. Czech Republic’s David Kostelcky and Italy’s Giovanni Pellielo ended up tied with a 73 while five other shooters scored a 72 to place second. Two other shooters are tied with a 71. Ang is joined from 29th to 33rd places by China’s Li Yajun, American Bret Erickson, Graeme Ede of New Zealand and France’s Stephane Clamens with a 65 Using a Beretta DT 10 shotgun which has been with him for the last three years, Ang couldn’t do anything right in the first frame and shot just 19 birds out of a possible 25 to fall way down early in the battles at the Beijing Shooting range, a 17,000-capacity hall designed to reflect the shape of a hunting bow. Ang, a businessman from Laoag City who got here as a wild card entry, recovered with a 24 in the second round, missing only the 23rd bird, before closing out with a 22 for that 65. Defending champion Michael Diamond of Australia was not far behind firing a 72 for a tie with four others, including Alexey Alipov, the same Russian who beat Ang in a shootoff for the last final slot in a top-level German tournament early this year. Actually, Ang ,who has been in this sport since 1996 after a long stint in practical shooting, was doing well in the first round until he missed three straight birds “between the 20th to the 25th bird.’’ His 19 turned out to be the second poorest score in the opening round, just a shot better than the 18 of Li Yajun, one of two hometown bets in this event where the world record is a perfect 125 held by Pellielo and the Olympic mark is 124 by Diamond. Javier, meanwhile, found himself in 36th place after the opening of Olympic archery’s ranking round. He scored 654 points out of the 720 perfect score with a still good chance of making it into the next round. The top 64 archers will advance into the elimination round phase where the Top 32 will face the bottom half in a knock-out match. Olympic archery competitions will run from August 9 to 15 and consists of four events, including men's and women's individual and team categories. Javier, ranked 87th in the world, scored a 321 in his first try then improved to 333 for a 654 total. He tied Calvin Hatley of South Africa, Chinese-Taipei’s Chen Szu Yuan and Matthew Grey of Australia. India’s Mangal Singh Champia and Viktor Ruban of Ukraine trail early leader Juan Rene Serrano (679) of Mexico, who is ranked 17th in the world, by one-point after each posting 678. South Korea’s Park Kyung-Mo is at fourth with a 676. Javier, 27, is set to face archery heavyweight Kuo of Taipei, who is in 29th place after a 659 tying Cuba’s Juan Carlos Stevens. Javier, who competed despite suffering from a mild case of diarrhea, needs to beat Kuo in the round that really matters most if he hopes to continue his campaign to win a medal of any color. The knockout phase will be held Wednesday, with Javier facing someone presently ranked second in the world and fancied to give defending champion and world record holder Im Dong-hyun of South Korea a lot of headaches. With the President watching along with several Filipino sports officials and politicians, Javier, using a 44-pound red bow, did well in the second half with 333 total, which was ranked the 17th best among the aggregates scored in the second session of 36 arrows. That was 8 hits shy of the second half best of 341 set by Serrano. In the next round, the format calls for the pairs to shoot 36 arrows, with the winners advancing to the round of 32. But the day belongs to host China after two of their athletes won the country’s first Olympic gold medals. The glitter of medal victories, however, was overshadowed by several off-field incidents that included a murder of an American volleyball coach’s relative and two doping controversies. A knife-wielding Chinese man attacked two relatives of the coach at a tourist site in Beijing, killing one and seriously injuring the other, team officials said. The man then committed suicide by throwing himself from the second story of the site, the 13th century Drum Tower five kilometers (three miles) from the main Olympic site. China quickly got on the gold medal tally board when Chen Xiexia won the women’s 48-kilogram weightlifting and 2006 world champion Pang Wei took the men’s 10-meter air pistol. “I had low expectations of myself, but my coach and teammates created ideal conditions for me to win," Pang said. Katerina Emmons of the Czech Republic had the distinction of winning the first of 302 golds to be awarded before the games end August 24 when she took the 10-meter air rifle Saturday morning. There were also two positive doping tests involving Beijing-bound track athletes with the Greek National Olympic committee saying 29-year-old sprinter Tassos Gousis, who competes in the 200 meters, tested positive for the steroid methyltrienolone Monday. Gousis was sent home from a pre-games training camp in Japan after being informed of the result. Russian steeplechase runner Roman Usov was pulled out of the games amid reports he failed a doping test conducted at the selection trials last month and only a week after seven female athletes from Russia were implicated in a doping scandal. The 30-year-old Usov placed second at the national trials in Kazan, Russia, last month and had been listed to compete in the 3,000-meter steeplechase. Russian media reported that Usov had tested positive for the banned substance Carphedon. Samuel Sanchez of Spain won the gold medal in the grueling men’s cycling road race that took the 143 competitors from central Beijing past Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and other landmarks before they rode out of the city for seven laps of a hilly loop course between two points on the Great Wall. “It’s like a dream, I still can’t believe I’ve just won the gold medal," Sanchez said. “The heat and humidity were extreme." In women’s basketball, Lauren Jackson, the WNBA’s most valuable player last year with the Seattle Storm, scored 18 points to lead Australia to an 83-64 win over Belarus. – AP/GMANews.TV