Japan, China evenly split swimming golds for the second day at EAG

HONG KONG, Dec. 7 -- For the second day running, China and Japan evenly split the eight swimming golds at stake at the 5th East Asian Games here on Monday.

The Chinese women's swimmers displayed their dominance fully, winning all the four events while the four men's events were taken by Japan.

Jiao Liuyang, a butterfly specialist, finally won a gold medal at the East Asian Games, thanks to the absence of her teammate and arch-rival Liu Zige.

Jiao Liuyang stormed home with at 25.91 seconds in the women's 50m butterfly, beating Misaki Ago of Japan to the second place at 26.64. The bronze medal was claimed by Hong Wenwen of China at 26.65.

The Chinese quartet eased home in the women's 4X200m freestyle relay with a winning time of 8:01.14, far behind the world record of 7:42.08 set by China in the swimming world championships.

Gao Chang and Zhao Jing finished one-two in the women's 50m backstroke final, clocking 27.43 and 27.45 respectively. Japanese Miyuki Takemura could not followed their pace and settled for the bronze at 28.48.

China also took the gold of women's 200m individual medley through Liu Jing, who was timed at 2:12.10. Tomoyo Fukuda of Japanand Kim Seoyeong of South Korea were closely behind at 2:12.15 and2:13.65 respectively.

The men's event saw an all-dominant performance staged by Japanese swimmers.

Yoshihiro Okumura won the first final of the evening, clocking 1:46.37 for the title of the men's 200m freestyle.

Zhang Lin of China, world record holder of 800m freestyle, was apparently no match to his Japanese opponents in the event. Zhang finished only third at 1:49.59. The silver medal was taken by another Japanese swimmer Sho Uchida at 1:46.87.

Zhou Jiawei and Shi Feng, both from China, failed to stop Kohei Kawamoto from winning the men's 50m butterfly. Kawamoto took the gold in 23.60 while Zhou and Shi were 0.23 and 0.39 seconds behind for the silver and bronze medals.

Japan's other two swimming golds came from Ryosuke Irie who won the men's 200m backstroke and Yohsuke Miyamoto who took the men's 800m freestyle event.