Sports

MANCHESTER: After spending nearly a year away from the baize, Ronnie O’Sullivan predicted “car crash” TV as he launched the defense of his world snooker title. In the end, his journey to recapturing the game’s biggest prize couldn’t have been smoother. O’Sullivan, snooker’s most talented and controversial player, won the world championship Monday for the fifth time, defending his title …

LOS ANGELES: World welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather will put his undefeated record on the line when he fights Mexican champ Saul “Canelo” Alvarez on Sept. 14 in Las Vegas. “I chose my opponent for September 14th and it’s Canelo Alvarez,” the 36-year-old Mayweather tweeted Wednesday night. “I’m giving the fans what they want.” Mayweather fought May 4 and remained unbeaten with a …

LONDON: Six-time Olympic champion Chris Hoy, who spearheaded a golden period of British track cycling dominance, announced his retirement Thursday, content he had nothing left to prove after a long and stellar career. Britain’s most successful Olympian, who won two golds at the 2012 London Games to add to three from Beijing four years earlier and his first in Athens in 2004, said the time was …

LOS ANGELES: Olympic swimming great Michael Phelps has thrown cold water on a report that he would come out of retirement with a view to swimming at the 2016 Rio Games. “Why do I keep getting texts about coming back?” Phelps said on Twitter Friday night after a Florida television station reported he planned to return to the pool. Peter Busch of an NBC station in Fort Myers, Florida, …

TEHRAN: Arch foes Iran and the U.S. have found some common ground in the fight to save wrestling as an Olympic sport. U.S. wrestling coach Zeke Jones on Tuesday called the sport an important “ambassador,” suggesting possible cooperation to fight a decision by the International Olympic Committee to drop wrestling from the 2020 Games. “Wrestling has brought closer the people of Iran and the U.S.,” Jones …

PARIS: Wrestlers around the world on Wednesday vowed to fight to save the ancient sport’s Olympic status, after the International Olympic Committee voted to drop it for the 2020 Games. Japan and Turkey — whose cities Tokyo and Istanbul are bidding to host the Games in seven years’ time — led the calls for the world body to reconsider, as an online petition was organised urging a …

BEIJING: Three-time world table tennis champion Zhuang Zedong, a key figure in 1971’s groundbreaking “pingpong diplomacy” between China and the United States, died Sunday, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported. He was 72 and had struggled with cancer since 2008. Zhuang won new fame by presenting a gift to American player Glenn Cowan, who had inadvertently boarded a bus carrying the Chinese team at …

LOS ANGELES: Shamed cyclist Lance Armstrong wants to return to competitive sport, but says the driving force behind his belated doping confession was the well-being of his five children. “The biggest hope and intention was the well-being of my children,” Armstrong told talk show host Oprah Winfrey in the second segment of their televised interview that aired on Friday. In the first installment aired …