Taiwan Today

Taiwan sprinters won the gold medal in the men’s 4x100 meter relay on the last day of the East Asian Games in Hong Kong Dec. 13 to secure the nation’s only track and field gold at this year’s event. Liu Yuan-kai, holder of Taiwan’s 100 meter sprint record, teamed up with Tsai Meng-lin and newcomers Yi Wei-chen and Tu Chia-lin to defeat their Japanese and Chinese rivals with their season best record of 39.31 seconds. The gold marked Taiwan’s first in the athletics competition at the East Asian Games since Chen Tien-wen won the 400-meter hurdles event in Osaka, Japan in 2001. The sprinters also came within four one-hundredths of a second of matching the nation’s 4x100 meter relay record set in 1990 at the Asian Games in Beijing. Last month, the Taiwan sprinters grabbed a bronze medal at the Asian Athletics Championship held in Guangzhou, mainland China with a time of 39.57 seconds. They fell just short of victory in a photo finish with their opponents from Thailand and India. In recent years, the 4x100 meter men’s relay event has been one of the focal points in the Chinese Taipei Track and Field Association’s training program. Taiwan sprinters fell just short of winning gold in the event at the 2005 East Asian Games in Macau, losing out to Japan. This year, the team was expected to finish in the top two places again before pulling off Sunday’s upset. After the victory, Wang Ching-cheng, secretary-general of the association, presented the sprinters with a US$1,000 cash award on behalf of Tsai Chen-wei, the association’s new board chairman. While presenting the award, Wang said “Today’s race was really beautiful. If we keep training, an Olympic medal is not out of the realm of possibility.” Wang also revealed that the sprint team’s time would have been even faster if Tu had fully recovered from a previous waist injury. He added that the team’s next target is winning gold at the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou and finishing with a time of under 39 seconds. Taiwan closed out the 2009 East Asian Games with a total of eight golds, 34 silvers and 47 bronzes to finish in fifth place in the overall medal standings. The nation won four fewer gold medals than at the previous games when it placed fourth overall. Hong Kong, which only won two gold medals at the Macau games four years earlier, grabbed 26 golds this time to place fourth overall. China, Japan and South Korea finished atop the medal standings, in that order. (SB)