| Henderson takes Tour points lead • Kiwi's second place moves him closer to green jersey triumph• Albasini holds overall lead but faces tense final stageIt was not the stage win Team Sky were looking for but the British squad finally gained some recompense for their efforts when their sprinter Greg Henderson took over the Tour of Britain green points jersey in Colchester. If the Kiwi can finish close to today's victor Borut Bozic of Slovenia tomorrow, Sky will leave this race with one major award in their pockets even if the overall title has eluded them.On yet another rapid stage in front of crowds of Tour de France proportions, Sky's Steve Cummings and Matt Hayman made the pace for much of the 92-mile stage, covered at almost 28mph through serried ranks of spectators in picture postcard villages such as Clare and Long Melford. The finish was decided when one rider braked on a narrow right-angled corner in the final kilometre to the finish in front of Colchester's Norman castle. That left a gap to the frontrunners, from whom HTC's Mark Renshaw launched the sprint. All cycle racing training manuals state that in an uphill finish a sprint effort should be left to the last, and Renshaw duly died, with Henderson taking over 300m out.As he too faded 50m before the line, the burly Slovenian Bozic came past in extremis to give Vacansoleil their second stage win. Together with Andre Greipel he will be a favourite tomorrow but the Dutch squad have already clinched the mountains jersey – there were only pimples in Suffolk and Essex today – and have an unassailable lead in the team prize.Race leader Michael Albasini had a relatively routine day until the final kilometre, when the Swiss crossed the line 11sec behind Henderson and Bozic and 8sec behind third placed Richie Porte. After time bonuses for the finish and intermediate sprints were taken into account, his overall lead was trimmed again. Bozic is now just 1min 5sec behind overall, and Albasani and his HTC team will have to remain vigilant in tomorrow's finale in Docklands.Tour of BritainCyclingWilliam Fotheringhamguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
O'Sullivan snookers suspicious minds • O'Sullivan does White no favours with 3-1 World Open win• 'No credence should be attached to unsubstantiated rumour'Ronnie O'Sullivan's 3-1 win over Jimmy White to reach the last 16 of the World Open in Glasgow exposed the falsity and perhaps malice of a rumour of uncertain origin, circulated by email, that O'Sullivan would lose on purpose because he owed White a favour.Neither O'Sullivan, in an 18-year professional career, nor White, in one of 30, has ever had a whiff of suspicion attached to them for such a malpractice.David Douglas, the high‑ranking former Scotland Yard policeman who has special responsibility, as a member of the World Professional Billiard and Snooker Association board, for the integrity of the circuit's matches and disciplinary matters generally, was made aware of the situation just as the match started and afterwards commented: "This was an unsubstantiated rumour to which no credence should be attached" – a judgment of course emphasised by the result.White, 48, now languishes at 66th in the rankings and rarely qualifies for the televised phase of tournaments. Slow to settle on that account, he was quickly 2-0 down but began to look more like the player who reached six world finals in his prime by stitching together a frame‑winning 88 in the third.It could easily have been 2-2 if White, in with 56 and beginning to fancy his chance, had not missed a tricky red to a middle pocket. As it was, O'Sullivan rose unperturbed from his chair to make the nerveless 80 clearance which put him through to play Stephen Hendry tomorrow for a place in the last eight.It was a match that illustrated how fine is the line between winning and losing in a mere best-of-five contest. The players are enjoying the event and the crowds have found it entertaining but the consensus is that it carries too many ranking points, particularly in the light of its random draw with no seeding, in comparison with others that start at the best of nine.Whatever the distance, though, a crisis point usually arrives at which leading players make their class, composure and self-belief tell – as O'Sullivan did.Afterwards he took the opportunity to emphasise that his reluctance to pot the last black of his 147 break on Monday in protest against the absence of a bonus prize for a maximum was only in the spirit of playful provocation."I'm a bit of a showman and I like to be given a bit of stick sometimes because I need reasons to play," he said of some of the criticisms which come his way. "I don't care about money. I live on a shoestring. I'm a bit of a hermit. I like to wind people up sometimes."Even so, among the players, there seems to be a consensus in favour of a bonus of some sort for a 147, even if it is not of the order of the £20,000 they could expect in previous seasons. A prize for the most maximums in a season has been mooted.Ronnie O'SullivanJimmy WhiteSnookerClive Evertonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Kirk Gibson to manage Arizona Diamondbacks The Arizona Diamondbacks took the interim tag off of Manager Kirk Gibson’s title. feeds.bizjournals.com |
Richard Williams: Cycling is the sport where losers win Drugs are again said to be pervasive in cycling, but the numbers who struggle and fail would suggest that is not the caseThe announcement of Alberto Contador's positive test for clenbuterol is the worst news to hit cycling since Floyd Landis's disgrace four years ago – even more damaging, since the sport has been redoubling its efforts to eradicate cheating. But nothing is more harmful than when a lot of people are suddenly saying, "They're all at it, aren't they? Including those guys Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish?"It was no help last week when the head of the Italian Olympic committee's legal commission on anti-doping, a 78-year-old magistrate called Ettore Torri, chucked a grenade into the room. "All the riders are taking drugs," he announced. "If it wasn't harmful to their health, maybe it would be better just to legalise it."Inside Italy the storm of denial was immediate and predictable. But so much mud has been thrown at cycling in recent years that few, even among those who admired Contador's three Tour de France victories in the past four years, following a recovery from radical brain surgery in 2004, are inclined to swallow his protestations. Many who listened to his story about a friend arriving at the Tour with a piece of "good meat", which he ate the night before giving the sample, wished that he had said nothing at all, at least in public.It was inevitable that the minds of those who follow cycling would go back to the Operación Puerto investigation of 2006, in which Spanish police looked into the affairs of Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, a former medical consultant with various teams. Among the 100 bags of blood found in Fuentes's clinic, and believed to belong to athletes involved in doping, was one marked with the initials "AC".Contador had been a member of the ONCE and Liberty Seguros teams, with whom Fuentes had worked. Several leading riders were suspended as a result of Operación Puerto, but Contador was cleared. In 2007 he won his first Tour in the jersey of Discovery Channel, Lance Armstrong's team, and the following year he switched to Astana, the Kazakh-funded squad which had risen from the ashes of Liberty Seguros and whose riders were barred from the 2008 Tour because of doping infringements by several of them during the previous season.His second and third Tours were won in Astana's colours, but immediately after this year's success he announced his intention to join Saxo-Bank, a team owned and managed by Bjarne Riis, the Dane whose victory in the 1996 Tour is marked by an asterisk following his admission in 2007 that he had used EPO. If Contador has been trying to distance himself from doping and dopers, he has not been doing a very good job.So why is one prepared to defend the reputations of Wiggins and Cavendish? There is a simple answer to this: because they lose.Wiggins finished a remarkable fourth in the 2009 Tour de France, thanks to a dogged performance in the mountains made possible by a severe training programme. No one had been expecting such a performance, and there were mutterings of suspicion, particularly in France. This year, however, with the amply-funded new Team Sky squarely behind him, Wiggins disappointed. It was true that the 2010 course, with its sharper climbs, did not suit him so well, but had he been systematically doping he would still surely have finished higher than 24th.Cavendish's story is a little different. After an unscheduled bout of serious dental surgery had destroyed his pre-season training schedule, the Manx sprinter came back to win five stages of the Tour de France and the green jersey in the Vuelta a España. But then came two events that also mean a lot to him: the world championship in Melbourne, which he failed to finish, and Sunday's Commonwealth Games road race in Delhi, where he proudly represented the Isle of Man but traipsed in a well-beaten seventh. A rider with a sophisticated doping programme, or even a crude one, would be unlikely to have failed so badly.In this particularly area of sport, claims of innocence can be made to look stupid very quickly. But it's still worth saying: in cycling, by their defeats ye shall know them.Blanc twists and Payet gives Romania stickAfter the trauma of the World Cup, France may be on their way back – at least to judge by two late goals against Romania on Saturday night with which they avoided a goalless draw that would surely have led to another departure from the Stade de France amid a hail of whistling. In the closing stages Laurent Blanc made a flurry of changes, and they paid off. Two of his substitutes, Loïc Rémy and Yoann Gourcuff, scored the goals, in the 80th and 93rd minutes, but it was the contribution of the third, Dimitri Payet, that caught the eye. A 23-year-old Réunion-born forward who plays for St-Etienne, Payet marked his debut with a couple of fast, direct runs, the second of which created the opening for Gourcuff's strike. He looked a hot property.Secretariat movie would strike a chord with GayeMarvin Gaye once compared himself to Secretariat, the great stallion who won the US Triple Crown in 1973. If a fine horse throws riders and has trouble getting into the starting gate, Gaye told me a couple of years before his death in 1984, who cares as long as it wins the race? "I'm nervous and highly strung," he added. "Apparently it goes with my talent."A Hollywood film telling Secretariat's story has just opened in the US, depicting a special relationship between the stallion and his owner, Peggy Chenery. The lady herself, who is now in her late 80s, downplays it. "We had a mutual respect," she told the New York Times, "but he didn't stand still long enough for me to look in his eye and say a prayer." Which is probably what Berry Gordy Jr, the founder of Motown Records, would have said about Gaye, his brilliant, headstrong protege.Note to self: mind what you say about McClarenLook, I never said I thought Steve McClaren should be the next manager of England, OK? I just pointed out that his recent achievements abroad would, if maintained, undoubtedly place him among the most plausible English candidates to succeed Fabio Capello. So then Sir Trevor Brooking is asked whether the FA would entertain the idea, and Brooking doesn't say no, and the next thing that happens is that McClaren is letting it be known that he would not even consider the idea. Memo to self: be more careful the next time you open your mouth.CyclingDrugs in sportAlberto ContadorRichard Williamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Nash responds to trade talk Nash responds to trade talk feeds.bizjournals.com |