Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, back to basics for the 2025 season
At the start of the year, Davidovich Fokina found himself languishing down in 68th in the ATP rankings, a world away from his career-high rank of 21.
Among his radical changes were an overhaul of his backroom team. The Málaga man brought in David Sánchez, who he had been working with the previous year, and Félix Mantilla as his key coaches.
“There are many aspects, but I think the main one has been the life change that I made, the recruitment of the team that I really want,” Davidovich Fokina explains. “I left my former coach, moved to Monaco and said, ‘I have to start my whole team from scratch’.
“With my manager, Gianmarco [Amatiste], who is also my best friend, we started to make calls and build the team bit by bit. We have a very good team, we are now looking for another coach, a second coach, but for now we are all here.”
Hailing from the coastal town of Rincón de la Victoria, the world no. 27 is the second-highest ranked Spanish ATP player, behind five-time major champion Carlos Alcaraz.
“There are quite a few Spaniards who are playing quite well nowadays,” he explains, “we also have a very good team for the Davis Cup, so I think that more young players will emerge to make us even stronger in the future.”
From underdog in 2024 to reigning champion in 2025, Barbora Krejčíková emerged to a warm applause on a boiling day at Wimbledon.
The Czech Olympic tennis champion was in for a tough opening round against rising Filipina star Alexandra Eala, but Krejčíková came through to win 3-6, 6-2, 6-1 on Tuesday, 1 July.
Krejčíková will meet Caroline Dolehide or Arantxa Rus in the second round of the Championships 2025.
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe (AP) — South Africa equalled its longest winning streak in men’s test cricket when it finished off Zimbabwe by 328 runs on Tuesday.
The ninth straight win for the world test champion tied the record of the 2002-03 Proteas.
Medium-pacer Corbin Bosch claimed a maiden five-for as Zimbabwe, set a target of 537, was bowled out for 208 in its second innings after lunch on day four.
Zimbabwe suffered its heaviest test defeat on runs.
Bosch struck on the day’s first ball, removing Nick Welch after he did the same with the last ball on Monday when opener Takudzwanashe Kaitano was caught at third slip.
Sean Williams prevented the hat trick, but Zimbabwe’s first-innings century-maker was among the five wickets to fall in the first hour.
Zimbabwe went from 32-1 overnight to 82-6, effectively the end of its unlikely chase.
The main resistance came from captain Craig Ervine with 49 and tailender Wellington Masakadza with 57, his maiden test half-century.
Bosch took 5-43 in his second test, and along with his unbeaten 100 in the first innings, became the first South African to do the hundred and five-for double in the same test since Jacques Kallis in 2002. He is only the fifth South African to achieve the feat.
South Africa, with only four of the 11 who won the World Test Championship at Lord’s last month, scored 418-9 declared and 369. Zimbabwe replied with 251 and 208.
The 19-year-old Lhuan-dre Pretorius was man of the match for his 153 on debut, and the other two debutants also starred; Dewald Brevis made 51 and took a wicket, and medium-pacer Codi Yusuf had figures of 3-42 and 3-22.
“I’ve had my eye on Lhuan-dre since the SA20, and he hasn’t looked back since in any format,”” Proteas stand-in captain Keshav Maharaj said. “He’s a mature young lad. To see how goes about his business in pressure situations was very heart-warming.
“And then there’s Dewald Brevis. Not many youngsters come into our system and express themselves the way he does. Bosch is new to the international scene, but he’s really fit in like a glove. To see him conquer both facets in this test match was really special.”
The teams stay at Queens Sports Club for the second and last test of the series starting on Sunday.
WIMBLEDON — Given their form coming in, Barbora Krejcikova and Alexandra Eala couldn’t have been on more different trajectories.
Krejcikova, the defending Wimbledon champion and No. 17 seed, missed the first five months of 2025 with a back injury and had to withdraw from this week’s Eastbourne quarterfinals citing a thigh injury. She was a modest 3-4 in 2025 since returning from a debilitating back injury.
Eala, still a teenager, leaped into the public consciousness back in March by beating three former Grand Slam champions — Jelena Ostapenko, Madison Keys and Iga Swiatek — in Miami. At the age of 20, last week she won six matches, including qualifying, to reach the final in Eastbourne before losing to Maya Joint — 12-10 in a third-set tiebreak.
But as Tuesday’s match progressed, muscle memory seemed to take over and Krejcikova regained her groove on the grass, defeating Eala 3-6, 6-2, 6-1.
A clean backhand down the line to finish it left Krejcikova — fist aloft — roaring in triumph. She now has 14 match-wins at Wimbledon, more than any other Grand Slam.
Before the tournament began, Krejcikova was reunited with the Venus Rosewater Dish, the trophy she won here nearly a year ago. Now, it appears, she’ll have a chance to regain it.
At the outset, things didn’t look quite so rosy.
With Krejcikova serving at 2-3 in the first set, Eala broke through on the strength of a backhand winner. Playing only the second Grand Slam main draw of her young career, she made that stand up by taking better care of her serve and hitting fewer unforced errors than Krejcikova.
But the defending champion came screaming back, taking a 5-0 lead in the second set and eventually forcing a decider.
Down 1-0 and facing her second break point, Eala didn’t do enough with an approach shot and couldn’t handle the subsequent volley. In the final analysis, Krejcikova — an accomplished doubles player — was better at the net. She won eight of 13 points, while Eala was only 2-for-9.
Krejcikova’s preparations for the tournament were not dissimilar last year, when she arrived at the All England Club having played just nine matches and struggling with injury.
Returning to the site of her emotional triumph, the 17th seed was keen to take in the experience of arriving as defending champion, spending time admiring the Venus Rosewater Dish before walking out on court.
“I really enjoyed the walk from the locker room down the stairs in front of the door to the court,” she added.
“When it opened, it was just a very beautiful and very joyful experience. This was really something that I was looking forward to since last year. I’m really happy that I had this opportunity to experience it.”
Despite that joy, Krejcikova looked somewhat out of sorts in the opening set against an in-form opponent.
Eala memorably stunned Iga Swiatek at the Miami Open in March, then made more history by becoming the first Filipina to reach the final of a WTA Tour event at Eastbourne last week, where she lost to Australian teenager Maya Joint.
That has catapulted her to 56th in the rankings, and all of that talent was on display on day two at the Championships.
The pair traded breaks early on as Krejcikova’s exquisite lob to take Eala’s serve was cancelled out by a double fault to put the match back on serve.
Mistakes from the reigning champion and an impressive range of shots from Eala secured a second break, and this time Krejcikova could not convert her break-back opportunity, missing the forehand on break point.
She seemed to be struggling on serve, uncomfortable with her ball toss and hit five double faults in the first set – perhaps an indication she is still battling that back injury.
After a lengthy game at 5-2 where Krejcikova saved a set point, Eala held her nerve to brilliantly serve out the set.
Krejcikova came back in the second set and, while she still looked uncomfortable on serve – frequently redoing her ball toss – she motored to a 5-0 lead.
Looking somewhat disappointed and desperate to avoid a second-set bagel, Eala rallied to hold her serve, then overturned one of the breaks, but could not prevent Krejcikova levelling the match.
A more comfortable third set followed as Krejcikova tidied up the errors and finally showed her emotion as she put herself on the brink of victory by securing the double break for 5-1, letting out a roar after her passing winner.
And a similar outburst of emotion followed as she booked her place in the second round.
WIMBLEDON — There’s something about grass that agrees with Katerina Siniakova.
The 29-year-old from the Czech Republic owns a winning record in singles at the All England Club, and she’s won the doubles title twice, most recently last year with Taylor Townsend. Her last singles crown came two years ago on the lawns of Bad Homburg.
On Tuesday, Siniakova added another substantial item to her resume on the green stuff, upsetting No. 5 seed Zheng Qinwen 7-5, 4-6, 6-1 to advance to Wednesday’s second-round match against unseeded Naomi Osaka. The Court 3 battle consumed 2 hours and 25 minutes on another blistering day.
It was the second Top 5 upset in a matter of hours, following No. 3 Jessica Pegula’s 6-2, 6-3 loss to Elisabetta Cocciaretto.
In four appearances at Wimbledon, the 22-year-old from China has produced only two wins.
Zheng was in good position to win the first set, leading 5-3, but Siniakova broke her usually solid serve twice and ran away with the final four games.
The second set was deadlocked at 4-all when Zhen completed a critical break with a lovely backhand overhead winner and served it out.
Siniakova, despite taking a medical timeout on the second set and at times looking affected by the heat, came out fast in the third, breaking Zheng to take a 2-0 lead, a margin that eventually ballooned to 5-0.
Continually harassing Zheng’s serve, Siniakova forced 15 break-point opportunities and converted five of them.
If Paris 2024 was the grand finale to a dramatic 1500m season, then the 2025 Bowerman Mile is the first episode of the next season, leading up to the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo from 13-21 September, and then eventually, LA 28.
So if you only watch one middle-distance race this season before the Worlds, make it the Bowerman Mile.
This episode of the mile is stacked with athletes who could all plausibly take the crown.
Let’s start with the heat around Frenchman Azeddine Habz. Until recently, he flew a bit under the radar. That was, until he ran a 3:27.49 at the Paris Diamond League, the sixth fastest 1500m time ever run. And while there’s always the chance that kind of race was a perfect storm, Habz seems ready to prove he can do it again. He’s a front-runner by nature, which makes him both dangerous and unpredictable as he could burn everyone off from the gun or risk fading late. Either way, he’ll be at the heart of the action.
Then there’s American Bowerman mile record holder and Paris 2024 bronze medallist Yared Nuguse. Steady, smooth and deceptively lethal, he’s been consistently near the top of every big race this season, even if he hasn’t quite had that breakout win yet this outdoor season.
In 2023, Nuguse went toe-to-toe with Bowerman mile record holder Jakob Ingebrigtsen in this exact race and nearly pulled off an upset. If he times his final kick right, he could finally take the victory that’s eluded him. Ingebrigtsen, meanwhile, is not on the start list this year.
Speaking of timing things right, Cole Hocker is known for showing up when it matters most. The Oregon native has had a steady stream of podium performances this season, finishing second and twice third in the 1500m race in Grand Slam Track events. Don’t be surprised if the home crowd lights a fire under their reigning Olympic 1500m champion and he unleashes that signature finishing kick when it counts. That is, if it’s timed right.
And the depth doesn’t stop there. Hobbs Kessler has quietly been running big-time numbers and seems to be in the form of his life. Cameron Myers, the 19-year-old Aussie prodigy, has already broken the 3:30 barrier and could be this year’s breakout star. Grant Fisher, Olympic bronze medallist in the 5000m and 10,000m, is stepping down in distance to sharpen his speed ahead of the World Championships, and he’s just the kind of guy who could throw a curveball into the mix.
Add to this two former 1500m world champions in Britain’s Jake Wightman (2022) and Kenya’s Timothy Cheruiyot (2019), and the 2025 Bowerman Mile has all the makings of a classic.
To win this year’s mile, you will need more than just speed. It’ll be about tactics, timing, and guts. Who goes early? Who waits? Who has something left in the tank with 100 metres to go?
It’s the uncertainty, the possibility, the feeling that anything could happen that makes this mile so magical.
The winners of next season’s AFC Champions League Two, Asia’s second-tier club competition, will receive about £1.8m. The winners of the Saudi King’s Cup will receive just over £1m. Prize money for the Saudi Pro League is not disclosed, but by the most recent available figures (for 2022-23) is in roughly the same area. Weekly attendances at the King Saud University Stadium, where top-tier ticket prices start at about £12, range between 10,000 and 25,000, although of course you also have to factor in pie and programme sales above that.
And so you really have to applaud Al-Nassr’s ambition in handing an estimated £492m to Cristiano Ronaldo over the next two years. Even if they sweep the board at domestic level, if they fight their way past Istiklol of Tajikistan’s 1xBet Higher League and Al-Wehdat of the Jordanian Pro League, if they extract maximum value from merch and sponsorships, you still struggle to see how they can cover a basic salary that comes to £488,000 a day, even before the bonuses and blandishments that will push the total package well beyond that.
Cristiano Ronaldo celebrates scoring for Al-Nassr against Al-Wehda in May. Photograph: Reuters
According to reports, the deal also involves Ronaldo taking a 15% ownership stake in Al-Nassr, extra incentives for winning the Pro League or the Golden Boot, a private jet allowance, 16 full-time staff including two chefs and three gardeners, and a bonus for every time he successfully presses an opposition player. Last one was a joke, obvs. And amid the stultifying assault of numbers, Ronaldo’s new contract – announced to great fanfare last week – marks a significant shift in the evolution of the superstar athlete, a further blurring of the lines between what we used to call “sport” and what we used to call “the other stuff”.
The first question to put: what exactly is Saudi Arabia getting for its money? Because of course Al-Nassr are a majority fund-owned club, an arm of the Saudi state, which is funnelling untold riches into its domestic league free from the encumbrance of cost controls or financial fair play rules. Ronaldo himself is in effect a Saudi employee, albeit one who has enjoyed much better fortune then most migrant workers who have entered the country in recent years.
On the pitch, Ronaldo’s influence has been highly visible: 99 goals in 111 games under four coaches. Give him a half chance in a tight space and even at the age of 40, there are still few players you would back over him. At the same time Al-Nassr have won no major trophies since his arrival and the club’s two other big attacking talents, Jhon Durán and Sadio Mané, have found themselves overshadowed to such an extent that both may leave this summer. Let’s charitably describe this one as: jury out.
In recent months there was talk of Ronaldo getting a short-term deal to play in the Club World Cup, a competition that would seem perfect for him: based entirely around celebrity power, influencer fame and a distinct lack of running. Politically and commercially, there was literally no reason for this not to happen. And so we can conclude that while many clubs were interested in his star wattage, none were prepared to pay the going rate to remould their entire system around a 40-year-old striker who lost his last half-yard of pace in about 2017.
But of course these days what Ronaldo can do on a football pitch is but a fraction of his total appeal. In an age when power itself is being reimagined along the lines of social media clout, when the attention economy and the actual economy are rapidly converging into one and the same thing, the fact Ronaldo is the most followed person on Instagram – and the third-most followed on X behind Elon Musk and Barack Obama – matters. In a way Ronaldo’s fame renders him a kind of one-man city state, an influencer first and an athlete second, his goals and assists entirely tangential to the eyeballs he can garner in the process.
What we have, in essence, is the professional athlete reimagined as a kind of plutocratic demigod, able to construct entire new realities around themselves. One in which the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia will be “the most beautiful ever”, or where the Saudi Pro League is “one of the top five leagues in the world”, as he recently put it. “It’s highly competitive, and those who don’t know that simply haven’t played here.” Fundamentally, this is not true on any measure: Opta ranks the Saudi Pro League as the world’s 29th best. And of course by his own criteria, Ronaldo would have had to play in all the others in order to make a reasoned assessment. But when you have 659 million Instagram followers, perhaps whatever you say becomes true simply by saying it.
Which is not to say the football is an irrelevance. Football is clearly still inherent to Ronaldo’s self-image, albeit these days more as an adjunct to his power than as the source of it. Ronaldo still plays football in the same way that Donald Trump plays golf: as part of a broader cult of personality, something to get photographed doing, content for the feed. A branding exercise stripped entirely of context or objective judgment, complete with massaged numbers and a coterie of obedient applauding acolytes. As is the continuing fixation on his physique, the positioning of Ronaldo as a kind of Übermensch, a transcendent individual, a higher form of biology, albeit one that still possesses an unerring ability to put free-kicks straight into the wall.
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And so Al-Nassr (and to a lesser extent the Portuguese national team) are no longer paying for Ronaldo the footballer. What they’re buying is Ronaldo the spiritual leader, the attention machine, the aura, the abdominals, the soft-power influence. They’re buying a place on his grid, the opportunity to allow one of the world’s most famous men to do their bidding. Perhaps it helps to think of his new contract as a kind of trade deal, a strategic alliance between two cynical regimes drunk on their own power and with largely congruent social views.
A billboard welcomes Cristiano Ronaldo to Saudi Arabia after he joined Al-Nassr at the end of December 2022. Photograph: Amr Nabil/AP
“I belong to Saudi Arabia,” Ronaldo stated proudly on announcing his new contract last week. And of course many star athletes in many sports have succumbed to the lure of the Saudi riyal, and will continue to do so. But there is a tonal difference between taking the money of a rogue state and actively advocating for them on the broadest possible stage. For years we have spoken of Saudi investment as a kind of moral dilemma, a fine balance of pecuniary motives, reputational concerns and human rights. For Ronaldo, it is clear that no such dilemma exists.
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