Valtteri Bottas’s win suggests the champion constructors will be ominously strong again this season and F1 deserves credit for the biosphere system which saw a Covid clear raceValtteri Bottas’s win in Austria might have been nail-biting for the team, given they feared his car was very close to a shutdown because of a gearbox sensor problem, but from the weekend as a whole Mercedes emerged ominously strong. Their car is comfortably once more at the front of the field, with their form bearing the hallmarks of one of those relentless Metallica riffs that churns on and on and on. Half a second up in qualifying, nearest competitor Red Bull had to opt for an alternate tyre strategy just to give...
World No 1’s stock has taken a pounding as ill-fated Adria Tour brutally acquaints tennis people with pandemic realitiesAfter all the hugging, football games, invasions of personal space, dancing in stuffy Belgrade clubs, kids’ days, basketball games and more, the enduring images of the fateful Adria Tour should be the final ones. Following the cancellation of the championship match, the deflated players were ushered into a parking lot at the dead of night as they queued to see whether they too had been infected after Grigor Dimitrov’s positive coronavirus test.Some of the details were striking. After two weeks of bros prancing around big crowds in the middle of a pandemic, everyone was suddenly wearing a mask for the first time....
Grigor Dimitrov’s positive test brought an end to the Adria Tour and also to Djokovic’s idea that he was somehow immune to the troubles of the wider worldNovak Djokovic has gone to ground in Belgrade, embarrassed, perhaps, possibly contrite, after the coronavirus pandemic crept up on his Balkans carnival of tennis, bringing the Adria Tour to a shuddering conclusion.It began in such robust spirits in his home city two weeks ago, in a makeshift setting at his tennis complex on the banks of the Danube. There were doubts and warnings about playing in front of fans but Djokovic, determined to showcase some of the best players in the world – Dominic Thiem, Alexander Zverev, Grigor Dimitrov and Borna Coric among...
New report suggests Cheltenham Festival and Liverpool match ‘increased several-fold’ the number of Covid-19 casesNow we know. The much-maligned decisions to go ahead with the Cheltenham Festival and Liverpool’s Champions League match against Atlético Madrid in March “caused increased suffering and death”, according to the scientist leading the UK’s largest Covid-19 tracking project. Well, colour all those who foresaw that particular revelation coming down the pipe surprised.In much the same way that you don’t need to be an optician to appreciate that loading the family into the car for a 60-mile pre-journey journey is not the best way to test your eyesight, an intimate working knowledge of Bunsen burners, pipettes and Erlenmeyer flasks was never going to be a prerequisite...
Athletes and supporters are compelled to wait, with no guarantee of a satisfying resolutionWaiting and cricket go hand in glove. It is an instruction barked urgently as a defensive push scuttles towards a fielder. It is the next batter, padded up, visualising their fate. It is the commentator’s lament as rain pools on tarpaulin covers.Cricket does not have a monopoly on waiting in sport, but the duration of a Test provides room for the passage of time to take on great significance, so much so that a contest could be understood almost entirely in the context of waiting. The pitch? How could you know how it’s faring until both sides have batted, or seen how much it turns on days...