Japan Rules the Pool as China Wins 1st Athletics Gold

Japan outplayed the United States to become the biggest winner in the last day's swimming competition while China finally won their first athletics gold medal at the Universiade in Shenzhen on Friday.

The US swimmers, who had contributed all of their country's 12 gold medals before Friday, lost their all-conquering power, failing to win any of the six golds on offer.

Japan bagged five medals, two of them gold. Italy added two golds with European short course champion Lucio Spadaro crowned with men's 50m freestyle and Rocco Potenza the men's 1500m.

But the United States still topped the gold tally of swimming with 12-11-4, Japan was second with 6-7-12 and China third 6-0-3. Chinese male swimmers failed to win a single medal.

With four days to go, the United States got their first gold medal from an event other than swimming. National champion and world No. 2 Jeshu Anderson showed his class in the 400m hurdles final, accelerating off the final hurdle to win comfortablely in 49.03 seconds.

His time was well off his best of 47.93 seconds and Anderson said he would need to run a lot faster at the world championships in Daegu, Korea in a fortnight to claim the gold.

"Today I eased up at the end," he said. "This race right here is just a tune-up for the world championships. I know for sure that the worlds won't be like this. It will be much faster but hopefully i can win a gold medal there."

Nia Ali earned the United States one more gold in the women's 100m hurdles.

Chinese walkers ended the host's gold drought in track and field, winning the women's 20m road walk team title through Shi Yang (5), Yang Yawei (6) and Wang Shanshan (9).

Spain's Julia Takacs Nyerges edged out two Russians to take gold in this event.

South Korea made a clean sweep of three taekwondo poomsae gold medals.

Olympic champions Wang Xin and Chen Ruolin thrilled the crowd as they soared off the 10m platform to claim the women's synchronized diving event.

One of their dives, an inward three-and-a-half somersault in tuck position, received a string of 9.5s for synchronization. The dive earned them 88.32 points, the highest score of the competition. They finished with a total of 349.98 points.

China harvested a total of 11 golds on Friday, taking their tally to 39. Russia is second with 24 golds, followed by Japan (17), South Korea (17) and the United States (14).