Davenport Defeats Hingis

An aching left wrist couldn’t stop Lindsay Davenport from winning the Advanta Championship.

Coming off a dominating performance against Venus Williams in the semifinals, the second-seeded Davenport used her powerful serve and strong baseline play to defeat top-seeded Martina Hingis, 6-3, 6-4, and win the title Sunday at Villanova, Pa.

It was Davenport’s first Advanta title after losing in the finals the past two years, to Hingis in 1997 and Steffi Graf in 1998.

Davenport played with a sore left wrist she hurt in October. While she didn’t term the injury serious, it was enough to keep Davenport out of the doubles semifinal Saturday night.

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Russia’s Yevgeny Kafelnikov won the Kremlin Cup for the third consecutive year, defeating Zimbabwe’s Byron Black, 7-6 (7-2), 6-4, at Moscow. . . . Asa Carlsson of Sweden won her first WTA Tour title, defeating American Erika De Lone, 6-2, 6-4, at the Wismilak International Championships in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. . . . Stockholm native Thomas Enqvist defeated Magnus Gustafsson, 6-3, 6-4, 6-2, in an all-Swedish final at the Stockholm Open. It was the third title for the top-seeded Enqvist in the oldest indoor tournament on the tour.

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Cecil Mamiit of Los Angeles is the top-seeded player at the $25,000 Acura event at the Mission Hills Tennis Center in Rancho Mirage. The tournament is a USTA challenger event. First-round action begins today. Other top players in the draw include Ronald Agenor, Andre Sa and James Sekulov. Wild-card entrants are Jonathan Stark and Taylor Dent of Newport Beach.

Day passes are $10 and weekly passes $40. For additional ticket information call (760) 328-5800.

Miscellany

Roseli of Brazil and Patience Avre of Nigeria each scored three goals as a women’s world all-star soccer team beat the United States, 12-7, despite three goals by Shannon MacMillan at East Rutherford, N.J.

U.S. sports administrators want to work with the International Olympic Committee to stamp out doping in all levels of sport, said White House chief drug fighter, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, speaking ahead of today’s international conference at Sydney, which brings together representatives from 26 governments to discuss new initiatives in the fight against performance-enhancing drugs. . . . The World Cup women’s ski races planned at Park City, Utah, this week will instead be held Copper Mountain in Colorado. It’s the first time in 14 years that warm weather forced World Cup ski races out of Utah.

Dutchman Gianni Romme sped to the fastest 5,000-meter clocking at an outdoor track by five seconds at Inzell, Germany, in the season’s first Speedskating World Cup. Romme finished in 6 minutes 31.02 seconds. . . . World champion Maria Butyrskaya won the women’s event at the Nation’s Cup at Gelsenkirchen, Germany, completing a near sweep of the figure skating titles for Russia. Yevgeny Plushenko won the men’s event and Maria Petrova and Alexei Tikhonov took the pairs event for the second consecutive year.

Australia defeated Cuba, 4-3, for the gold medal in the Intercontinental Cup at Sydney when pinch-hitter Gary White’s drove home the winning run in the 11th inning. Milwaukee Brewer catcher David Nilsson of Australia was the tournament’s most valuable player with a tournament-high 12 runs batted in. . . . Two-time World Cup and Olympic champion Cuba and European champion Russia secured places in the 2000 Olympics with victories in the women’s World Cup volleyball tournament at Tokyo.

The fourth-ranked UCLA women’s basketball team got 23 points from All-American Maylana Martin to defeat Slovakia, 93-71, before 510 at Pauley Pavilion. . . . Tamicha Jackson scored 21 points as No. 6 Louisiana Tech ended No. 2 Tennessee’s 41-game home winning streak with a 69-64 victory in the Women’s Tip-off Classic. . . . Arizona sophomore guard Ruben Douglas, a 14-game starter a season ago has decided to leave the Wildcats’ basketball program. . . . Memphis basketball Coach Tic Price resigned eight days before he was to begin his third season at the Conference USA school.

New York’s Young America had a resounding 4-minute 58-second win over Hawaii’s Abracadabra and will race against Italy’s Prada, which beat Dennis Conner’s Stars and Stripes in the challenger series for the America’s Cup at Auckland, New Zealand.