#billy-bonds

#billy-bonds

Ronnie, who won gold for Ireland in the 1956 Melbourne games, was a role model to athletes at home and abroad. Throughout his brief athletic career, Ronnie inspired young Irish runners to follow their dreams. His remarkable victory in Australia marked the first gold medal for Ireland in two decades, since Bob Tisdall and Pat O'Callaghan won gold in 1932.

"It's a special day for me to be here," he said. "Back in October, the team came to me and said, MLSE would like to honour me and celebrate the 10-point game. I thought that's pretty cool and pretty special. Never realized it would come to the magnitude it is here today, but it means a lot to me."

It was not just the digits next to Bethell's name, 142 not out from 232 balls, 15 fours, but the manner in which they came about. This was pure spun silk, elegance personified, all back-foot punches and pull shots struck with Swiss clock precision. Remarkably, it was also his maiden first-class century. No specialist England batter has ever achieved this feat in a Test match, just handful of wicketkeepers and bowlers.

There are two ways to look at this. Either Alex de Minaur is not good enough to beat Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, for that matter or the world's top two players are in a class of their own. Sadly, for Australia's top-ranked player, both things are true. De Minaur's 7-5, 6-2, 6-1 quarter-final defeat by Alcaraz on a hot, breezy evening at the Australian Open on Tuesday was a humbling experience.

Unrivalled, the next instalment in the Canadian author's Game Changers series, will be released internationally on 29 September, the publisher HarperCollins announced on Tuesday. The wild success of the screen adaptation has driven a level of interest in the books that rivals that of Bridgerton, booksellers have told Guardian Australia, with paperback copies of the first two novels selling out within a day and backorders piling up.

We are playing against the best teams week in, week out. We have to keep pushing and believing in ourselves, controlling the controllable. We have to block out the outside noise. We have done that really well. People are going to talk up the title race, but we have a really calm group.

It's as beautiful as his tennis, Alcaraz said of Federer's golf swing. I'm not surprised. It's unbelievable. Everything he does, he does in style, really beautiful. On the golf course, it's a really beautiful swing.

Alexander Bublik, the resident eccentric of professional men's tennis, has the lyrics to two different Eminem songs tattooed on his arm. Doubles specialists, he's said, aren't "real athletes," though Bublik himself reached the doubles final of the 2021 French Open. The 28-year-old Kazakh has quoted Kung Fu Panda to cast doubt on Jannik Sinner's doping status, and called the tennis exhibited by greats like Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal "boring."