Korean girls smash hosts in Asian basketball

JAKARTA: A joint Korean women’s basketball team marked their Asian Games debut Wednesday by pulverising hosts Indonesia 108-40, roared on by giddy fans waving unified Korean flags.

North Korean Ro Suk Yong, one of three Pyongyang-based players in the away team, top-scored with 22 points for the sharp-shooting visitors and fellow northerner Kim Hye Yon added 14 in a lop-sided Group X opener in Jakarta.

Around 100 Korean fans in white T-shirts bearing a blue unified Korean flag with the slogan “One dream, one Corea”, serenaded the players and banged drums as they tried to drown out a wall of noise produced by cymbal-crashing locals. “We haven’t had a lot of time to work on our team chemistry but we speak the same language and we are all on the same page,” Korean coach Lee Moon-kyu told AFP. “North or South Korean, we all have the same desire to win.” There was a stark contrast between the South Korean players with their dyed hair and trendy bobs and the sensible haircuts of their northern cousins. But the harmony demonstrated on the court suggested they will be medal challengers. North and South Korea are also fielding united teams in canoeing and rowing at the Asian Games in the latest sign of thawing relations on the troubled peninsula.

The two countries are also set to march together at the opening and closing ceremonies after forming their first-ever unified Olympic team — a joint women’s ice hockey side — for February’s Winter Games in Pyeongchang. The Asian Games formally open on Saturday and run until September 2. The joint Korean hockey team’s participation in Pyeongchang provoked a backlash in the South, with critics complaining that Seoul was depriving its own athletes of the chance to compete. But ultimately the romance of the occasion, sound-tracked by North Korea’s famed “army of beauties” cheerleaders, melted hearts and became one of the symbols of the Winter Olympics, despite the team failing to win a single game.

Ties between the neighbours have improved since the Winter Olympics, with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in subsequently meeting at an historic summit — just months after a nervous period of missile launches and threats of nuclear war from Pyongyang.

China star Dong Dong eyes last jump in Tokyo: Chinese trampoline star Dong Dong has spent his life defying gravity, but now he wants to defy his age as he trains to participate in a record-equalling fourth Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2020. Dong, 29, has reached the podium in all three of his Olympic appearances: bronze at the age of 19 in Beijing in 2008, gold in London four years later and silver in Rio in 2016. But he is leaping at the chance to somersault his way into the Tokyo Games, which would make him the first male trampolinist to participate in four Olympics. Tatsiana Piatrenia of Belarus, who never won a medal, was the first female to compete in the discipline at four Games. “My goal for Tokyo is always to win the gold medal,” the high-flying gymnast told AFP at the national trampoline training base at the Beijing Sport University. The telegenic Olympian, who has a large fan following, will be 31 by the time Tokyo comes around and another podium spot would make him one of the oldest to win a medal in his discipline and cement his star status.