
Wimbledon 2025 LIVE RESULTS: Emma Raducanu vs Marketa Vondrousova on NOW, Alcaraz beats Tarvet, Fritz also in action
Katie Boulter makes an underwhelming start against lucky loser Solana Sierra out here at a half-empty No1 Court.
The Brit - watched on by fiance Alex De Minaur - breaks in the first game of the match but then is broken straight back after laying two double faults.
Another double-fault at 3-2 sees her broken again, putting her Argentine opponent in charge.
Rising star Sierra is only in the main draw because she was randomly selected to fill in for an injured player, having lost in qualifying.
But she is more than holding her own against her Leicester-born opponent, who is doing little to get the fans who are watching on from the stands off their seats.
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
BREAKING NEWS Venus Williams, 45, reveals she is engaged to her actor boyfriend, 36
Venus Williams has confirmed that she is engaged to her actor boyfriend Andrea Preti after winning her first tennis match in over a year. Williams, 45, made the revelation on the tennis court, where she was interviewed after rolling back the years to beat Peyton Stearns in straight sets at the Citi Open in Washington D.C. It was her first match in 16 months and after a triumphant straight sets win, she confirmed to the crowd that in her time away from the game she had gotten engaged. 'My fiancé is here and he really encouraged me to keep playing,' she said to huge cheers and applause from the crowd. 'There were so many times where I just wanted to coast and kind of chill. Do you know how hard it is to play tennis? You guys don't know how much work goes into this, like it's 9 to 5 except you're running the whole time. 'Lifting weights and just like dying and then you repeat it the next day. So he encouraged me to get through this and it's wonderful to be here. He's never seen me play.' The news comes after Williams had surgery last year to remove fibroids from her uterus, which had impacted her across the course of her glittering career. Speaking on Monday after winning in the doubles, Williams revealed how her mindset around her game had changed after her health scare. 'Where I am at this year is so much different where I was at last year. It's night and day, being able to be here and prepare for the tournament as opposed to preparing for surgery a year ago,' she said. 'At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if your health is not there. So, it definitely put it in perspective for me and maybe made it easier to make the decision to maybe come back out here and maybe play even freer.' Williams became the oldest player to earn a WTA singles victory since Martina Navratilova won a match at Wimbledon in 2004 as a 47-year-old with her victory on Tuesday.


Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Global Clipper race lives up to its name, with Britons in the minority
A Frenchman, an American and a Belarussian board a Clipper Round the World yacht and the skipper says 'where have all the Brits gone?' It may sound like the start of a joke, but the increasing popularity of Sir Robin Knox-Johnston's race has resulted in the proportion of British crew plummeting, with more than half of sailors taking part hailing from the rest of the world. 'Originally it was only the Brits and a few Europeans taking part, but the last race had 43 nationalities' Knox-Johnston, 86, said, before the start of this year's race at the end of next month. 'The international crew were at 53 per cent in the last race, with the Brits down to 47.' The biennial race, where about 700 amateur sailors pay to race around the world on a 70ft racing yacht, helped by a professional skipper, first launched in 1996. This year's event, which takes place across eight legs and involves a fleet of 10 Clipper 70 yachts, will have the highest number of international crew so far. 'We've got better known internationally,' Knox-Johnston said. 'We go to these ports around the world and when you get crew from other countries their newspapers send reports back, so that's bloody good advertising.' Forty-five per cent of the crew aged 40 and under are female this year, while across all ages about 25 per cent of the crew are women. The biggest group of participants, after the British, is now Americans. 'It used to be Australians, but that's dropped,' said Knox-Johnston, who became the first man to sail non-stop around the world solo in 1969. The first thing prospective crew have to do is complete four weeks of rigorous sail training on the Solent, where Clipper has its headquarters in Gosport, Hampshire. It costs about £10,000 to complete the training and take part in one of the race legs. For those wanting to do the full circumnavigation of the globe it costs more than £50,000. When The Times joined a crew of 12 amateurs completing their first week of training, only two were British. The rest came from Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Switzerland, France, Belarus, Germany and the US. It is a steep learning curve as many sign up without any previous sailing experience, having seen an advert at a time when they want to radically change their lives. Kyle Vacca, 43, a former pilot in the US Air Force who is now an engineer and mission manager at SpaceX, managed to lose his iPhone overboard just before the crew's first man overboard drill, after someone knocked into him on deck. 'It's been a very intensive learning experience,' Vacca said. 'I am used to operating procedures in potentially hazardous environments while being safe and working with a team, so the details are new to me but there are a lot of similarities.' By the end of the first week they are beginning to get to grips with the vast array of different ropes onboard and bewildering terminology. 'You need to load the halyard on to the pit winch and open the jammer,' Nigel Parry, 60, the skipper of the training boat, shouts into the wind at Alice Morel, 35, a French travel agent living in Queensland, Australia, who has no previous sailing experience. Then he barks: 'Oliver, are you milkmaid? Then you should be on the other side of the mast.' Later in the day they attempt their second man overboard drill. Trish McLaughlin, 55, a retired Canadian police officer from Mount Currie, a small town of 5,000 people in British Columbia, is winched over the side to retrieve a floating dummy from the choppy Solent. 'I've always wanted to learn how to sail for my retirement and see the world,' she said, after successfully retrieving the dummy on the third attempt. 'I saw Clipper on my social media feeds and this made me realise I could learn to cross an ocean.' McLaughlin said the training had been 'a lot'. 'I didn't realise sailing was as technical as it has been,' she said. 'I used to have a water phobia but I conquered that so I could go sailing. 'I did have some people saying, 'Are you crazy?' and 'What are you wasting all your money for?' but it's my investment in my retirement, to be able to meet beautiful people in beautiful places, and see a little bit more of the world.' The 14th edition of the race sets sail from Portsmouth on August 31, but for those who prefer to keep their feet on dry land, a new five-part series called No Going Back, which follows the teams in the 13th edition, is available on Amazon Prime Video.


The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
45-year-old Venus Williams becomes the oldest woman since Martina Navratilova to win a match
Venus Williams became the second-oldest woman to win a tour-level singles match in professional tennis, delivering some of her familiar big serves and groundstrokes at age 45 while beating Peyton Stearns — 22 years her junior — by a 6-3, 6-4 score at the DC Open on Tuesday night. This was the first singles victory for Williams in nearly two years. The only older woman to win a match was Martina Navratilova at 47 in 2004. The former No. 1-ranked Williams had not played singles in an official match anywhere since March 2024 in Miami, missing time while having surgery to remove uterine fibroids. She hadn't won in singles since August 2023 in Cincinnati. Until this week, she was listed by the WTA Tour as 'inactive.' But backed by a crowd that clearly was there to see, and support, her at the hard-court tournament in the nation's capital, Williams showed glimpses of the talent she possesses and the skills she displayed while earning all of her Grand Slam titles: seven in singles, 14 in women's doubles — all alongside younger sister Serena — and two in mixed doubles. In Tuesday's second game, for example, Williams smacked a return winner to get things started, then delivered a couple of other big responses to break Stearns, a 23-year-old who won singles and team NCAA titles at the University of Texas and is currently ranked 35th. In the next game, Williams sprinted forward to reach a drop shot and replied with a winner. Soon, she led 4-2, then was closing that set. She was accompanied by choruses of cheers. The first arrived when Williams walked out into the main stadium at the DC Open, a 7,000-seat arena that's more than twice as large as where she was for her doubles victory a day earlier. Another came when she strode from the sideline to the center of the court for the formality of the coin toss. The noise really reached a crescendo when Williams began hitting aces — at 110 mph and faster — the way she used to. There also were moments where Williams looked as if it had been just as long as it actually has since she competed, including in the opening game, when she got broken at love this way: forehand wide, forehand into the net, forehand long, backhand long. At the end, it took Williams a bit of extra effort to close things out. She kept holding match points and kept failing to convert them. But eventually, she powered in a 112 mph serve that Stearns returned into the net. That was it: Williams smiled wide as can be and jogged to the net to shake hands, then performed her customary post-win pirouette-and-wave. She advanced to a second-round matchup against No. 5 seed Magdalena Frech, a 27-year-old from Poland. In other action Tuesday, Emma Raducanu handed No. 7 seed Marta Kostyuk a sixth consecutive loss by eliminating her 7-6 (4), 6-4. That set up a matchup between Raducanu and four-time major champion Naomi Osaka, who was a 6-2, 7-5 winner against Yulia Putintseva. Two top men's seeds exited: Cam Norrie beat No. 2 Lorenzo Musetti 3-6, 6-2, 6-3, and No. 3 Holger Rune withdrew from the tournament because of a back injury. No. 4 seed Ben Shelton defated Mackie McDonald 6-3, 6-4. ___