Latest news with #Ainslie
The Age
3 days ago
- General
- The Age
In the dark, amid screams, Ainslie had 16 terrified little girls and one headlamp
Texas: The first drops of rain had yet to fall when Ainslie Bashara, a counsellor at Camp Mystic, noticed that one of the younger girls had begun to tear up. They were walking back to their cabin, Giggle Box, as another storm swelled over the Texas Hill Country. The girl feared what was coming, so Ainslie wrapped an arm around her. 'It's just heat lightning,' Ainslie, 19, recalled assuring her that evening. 'There's nothing to it.' It was just past 9pm on July 3, the start of Ainslie's night off from tending to Giggle Box's 16 'littles'. She popped inside to grab her backpack just as the girls, all between eight and 10, began to brush their teeth and slip on their pyjamas. Ainslie said goodbye and headed out for a break with friends. By the time she came back, shortly after midnight, she had to sprint. The storm had begun to pound the 99-year-old Christian camp situated along the Guadalupe River in Hunt, Texas. The cabin was no more than 180 metres from the bank. Ainslie had arrived a week earlier for a month-long stay. She couldn't remember a time when Mystic hadn't been part of her life. Her aunt and older sister had attended, and she'd started at age seven, spending 10 Julys riding horses and catching perch, exchanging friendship bracelets and learning about Jesus. Her younger sister, entering her last year as a camper, had begged Ainslie to return this summer as a counsellor. So now, inside Giggle Box, she changed out of her wet clothes and into shorts and a T-shirt, quietly sliding into her bed in a corner near the front door. The girls lay still in their beds, some snuggled with stuffed animals. Ainslie stared out the window. A native Texan, she'd seen hundreds of summer squalls, but this one felt heavier. The thunder cracked like fireworks inside the cabin. Ainslie couldn't sleep, braced for a frightened camper to slink over in need of comfort. The lightning lit the room like flashbulbs, and at each strike, she scanned faces around the room. Then she noticed a car pass by – a bizarre sight at that hour. She glanced at her watch: 1.58am. She soon heard another noise that, at first, felt out of place. Two nearby cabins housed Mystic's youngest campers, and the eight-year-olds had started shrieking. Ainslie, a rising college sophomore and her cabin's oldest counsellor, hurried across the room to her two co-counsellors, who'd each just graduated from high school. Both were restless. 'This storm is really bad,' she said, preparing them to help console their girls if they, too, began to break down.
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- General
- Sydney Morning Herald
In the dark, amid screams, Ainslie had 16 terrified little girls and one headlamp
Texas: The first drops of rain had yet to fall when Ainslie Bashara, a counsellor at Camp Mystic, noticed that one of the younger girls had begun to tear up. They were walking back to their cabin, Giggle Box, as another storm swelled over the Texas Hill Country. The girl feared what was coming, so Ainslie wrapped an arm around her. 'It's just heat lightning,' Ainslie, 19, recalled assuring her that evening. 'There's nothing to it.' It was just past 9pm on July 3, the start of Ainslie's night off from tending to Giggle Box's 16 'littles'. She popped inside to grab her backpack just as the girls, all between eight and 10, began to brush their teeth and slip on their pyjamas. Ainslie said goodbye and headed out for a break with friends. By the time she came back, shortly after midnight, she had to sprint. The storm had begun to pound the 99-year-old Christian camp situated along the Guadalupe River in Hunt, Texas. The cabin was no more than 180 metres from the bank. Ainslie had arrived a week earlier for a month-long stay. She couldn't remember a time when Mystic hadn't been part of her life. Her aunt and older sister had attended, and she'd started at age seven, spending 10 Julys riding horses and catching perch, exchanging friendship bracelets and learning about Jesus. Her younger sister, entering her last year as a camper, had begged Ainslie to return this summer as a counsellor. So now, inside Giggle Box, she changed out of her wet clothes and into shorts and a T-shirt, quietly sliding into her bed in a corner near the front door. The girls lay still in their beds, some snuggled with stuffed animals. Ainslie stared out the window. A native Texan, she'd seen hundreds of summer squalls, but this one felt heavier. The thunder cracked like fireworks inside the cabin. Ainslie couldn't sleep, braced for a frightened camper to slink over in need of comfort. The lightning lit the room like flashbulbs, and at each strike, she scanned faces around the room. Then she noticed a car pass by – a bizarre sight at that hour. She glanced at her watch: 1.58am. She soon heard another noise that, at first, felt out of place. Two nearby cabins housed Mystic's youngest campers, and the eight-year-olds had started shrieking. Ainslie, a rising college sophomore and her cabin's oldest counsellor, hurried across the room to her two co-counsellors, who'd each just graduated from high school. Both were restless. 'This storm is really bad,' she said, preparing them to help console their girls if they, too, began to break down.
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
Jannik Sinner barely breaks sweat to cruise through Martínez mismatch
The most vivid sequence, perhaps the only real piece of content in this 6-1, 6-3, 6-1 third round victory for Jannik Sinner against a semi-fit Pedro Martínez, came midway through the second set on Centre Court. To that point the entire contest had felt like the tennis equivalent of watching an injured lemur being run down, idly, by a slightly bored big cat. Martínez had come into this match with an injured shoulder. Hmm. How's that going to work out? And pretty much from the start each break saw the Spaniard's shirt off, shoulder pounded furiously by medical orderlies, eyes boggled, chest hair damp with sweat, while a few yards away Sinner sat completely still and unmoved, a neat man in a cap, thinking. There was the traditional middle Saturday sports-stars shindig in the royal box, albeit one that dished up pretty much the same approved gallery that seems to have been coming here since 1903. Ainslie. Redgrave. Hurst. Kenny. A certain IT Botham (how many Test wickets have you lot got then?). It was also a day to close the roof on Centre Court as a light drizzle fell outside. The roof really is a magnificent suburban spectacle, the greatest side return conservatory in south-west London. Beneath it Centre Court becomes Kew Gardens, steamy, fragrant, echoey with lunchtime chitter-chatter. Sinner is a slightly strange sight even in the warm-up. Here we have a super athlete, the boy who could have gone with skiing or football but decided instead to become world No 1 at his third-favourite boyhood sport, but who is also gangly and skinny-legged, with the air on court of a slightly hunched and mannered junior actuary. Right up, that is, until he starts stretching his limbs and doing standing jumps and – hang on – suddenly he's floating above the Wimbledon turf like a white-shorted vampire. Sinner is also a fascinating world No 1, in large part because he lacks any really obvious point of fascination. Sinner is very, very good at tennis. How is he good? By being good at tennis. His victories are often described as suffocating. But he isn't exactly relentless or repetitive. There are angles, aggression, power, off-your-seat winners. His tennis is great product, like a meal in a high-end restaurant in an air-conditioned mall where everything is fine, good, top-notch, well done but still somehow hard to think about too much in the abstract. Martínez came out ready to mix it up, his only real chance of making any impact. There were some netted volleys, missed first serves, an early dropped service game. Seven minutes in he already looked surrounded. So he came to the net and volleyed more. He chucked in a 76mph high-kick first serve. Twenty minutes in: 5-0 Sinner. A 6-1 first set felt like a minor salvage job. The second seemed to heading the same way until, at 4-2 down, and with Martínez already serving like a man leaning back in a rocking chair and listening to his neck creak, that brief moment of tension arrived. It looked like a combination of endorphins and what-the-heck professional pride. Either way Martínez managed to muster a couple of games that lasted almost as long as the match to that point. The first extended deuce did feel like like an act of mild torture. Martínez began to groan and breathe heavily. But he took the game to huge cheers, showed heart and skill, punched the air, and even grinned occasionally. Sinner's calm through this was also notable. He aced out break points. He stuck to the processes, still wearing the same shrewd, wary look. His footwork, side to side, never back, is deceptively quick and precise. He has that astonishing way of taking balls bouncing just in front of him on the forehand side, taking balls at full power right by his ankles just by bending his knees and whipping those unusually fast hands. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Sinner steered Martínez gently to 5-3, with an injection of precision, finding angles with his backhand drives, then closing the set with a perfect diagonal half-court volley. At times the power of his groundstrokes was startling. Playing against him involves always shuffling backwards. It must be utterly exhausting, There are of course elements of beauty too. The sudden slice, the drop shot when he's pummelled you back, the inside-out forehand winner with no change of body position, just a small shift of the wrist. Martínez was done by now. The final set disappeared in a haze of creaks and groans, with an effortless reassertion of crisp, clean baseline control. And at the end the question of how to beat Sinner, how to ruffle his low-tick intensity, was no closer to being answered, at least for anyone not called Carlos Alcaraz. Sinner has been No 1 for more than a year now, although Alcaraz is favourite to win this tournament, in part because of his excellent head-to-head record. It already feels like a final this Wimbledon is hungry for, a place that has always thrived on rivalries and face-offs. The styles are a good match. Alcaraz's superpower against Sinner is being good enough to change the angles, to come forward and leave the baseline graveyard. But it will also help Sinner that he was able to move through this match without taking anything out of himself. At the end he talked up the quality of the rallies and shrugged at Martínez's physical state, praising his ability to carry on. No Italian player has ever won a Wimbledon singles title. On current form the list of people with a fair shot at preventing that sequence from ending this year still stands at one.
Dubai Eye
24-06-2025
- Sport
- Dubai Eye
Andy Murray to be honoured with statue at Wimbledon
Wimbledon will soon feature a permanent tribute to one of Britain's sporting greats, as the All England Club announced plans to honour Andy Murray with a statue at the iconic tennis venue. The 38-year-old retired in August after an appearance at the Paris Olympics and will get his own statue after ending Britain's 77-year wait for a home men's singles champion in 2013 when he beat Novak Djokovic in the final. Murray won Wimbledon again in 2016 and was knighted the next year for his services to tennis and charity. A popular player on and off the court, Murray reached world number one and claimed three Grand Slam singles titles during his career despite competing in an era dominated by greats such as Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Djokovic. "We are looking to have a statue of Andy Murray here (at Wimbledon) and we're working closely with him and his team," chair of the All England Club Debbie Jevans told the Ainslie + Ainslie Performance People podcast published on Tuesday. "The ambition is that we would unveil that at the 150th anniversary of our first championship, which was 1877. He's got to rightly be very involved in that and he and his team will be." The new statue would stand alongside that of Fred Perry, who was Britain's last men's singles champion until Murray's victory.
The Star
24-06-2025
- Sport
- The Star
Tennis-Murray to be immortalised with statue at Wimbledon
FILE PHOTO: Tennis - Barclays ATP World Tour Finals - O2 Arena, London - 16/11/15 Men's Singles - Great Britain's Andy Murray in action during his match against Spain's David Ferrer Action Images via Reuters / Tony O'Brien Livepic EDITORIAL USE ONLY. (Reuters) -Wimbledon will soon feature a permanent tribute to one of Britain's sporting greats, as the All England Club announced plans to honour Andy Murray with a statue at the iconic tennis venue. The 38-year-old retired in August after an appearance at the Paris Olympics and will get his own statue after ending Britain's 77-year wait for a home men's singles champion in 2013 when he beat Novak Djokovic in the final. Murray won Wimbledon again in 2016 and was knighted the next year for his services to tennis and charity. A popular player on and off the court, Murray reached world number one and claimed three Grand Slam singles titles during his career despite competing in an era dominated by greats such as Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Djokovic. "We are looking to have a statue of Andy Murray here (at Wimbledon) and we're working closely with him and his team," chair of the All England Club Debbie Jevans told the Ainslie + Ainslie Performance People podcast published on Tuesday. "The ambition is that we would unveil that at the 150th anniversary of our first championship, which was 1877. He's got to rightly be very involved in that and he and his team will be." The new statue would stand alongside that of Fred Perry, who was Britain's last men's singles champion until Murray's victory. Perry's bronze statue was unveiled in 1984, commemorating the 50th anniversary of his first singles triumph. (Reporting by Tommy Lund in Gdansk)
