Hamlin holds off Truex to win at Kansas Speedway
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Denny Hamlin held off hard-charging Martin Truex Jr. down the stretch on Sunday to win at Kansas Speedway for the first time.
Truex had dominated most of the race, but Hamlin had gone to the front when his car hooked up under the first sunshine of the afternoon. Truex mounted a comeback, diving low with a couple laps left, but he couldn’t make the move stick, and Hamlin pulled away.
He coaxed his Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota the rest of the way for his second win this season.
Truex wound up leading a race-high 173 laps but had to settle for second, his third top-5 finish of the season. He still hasn’t won in 175 Sprint Cup races.
Jimmie Johnson finished third for Hendrick Motorsports, which has failed in 14 tries to win the team’s milestone 200th race. Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kasey Kahne also finished in the top 10.
Nadal beats Djokovic
to win Monte Carlo final
MONACO — Rafael Nadal finally managed to beat Novak Djokovic in a final, thrashing the top-ranked Serb 6-3, 6-1 on Sunday to win the Monte Carlo Masters for the eighth consecutive year and end a run of seven straight defeats to his rival in title matches.
Nadal was hardly troubled by Djokovic in this one and broke the Serb’s serve five times in a one-sided affair on clay to win his 42nd straight match at Monte Carlo. It was his first title since last year’s French Open and the 47th of his career.
The 25-year-old Nadal thrust his hands in the air after clinching victory in style with an ace that flew past the beleaguered Djokovic, who beat Nadal in an epic Australian Open final this year.
Djokovic, who has been playing through grief since the death of his grandfather Thursday, said he felt emotionally drained and was unable to summon the mental strength he needed to dig deep against Nadal.
“I definitely don’t want to take away anything from Rafa’s win. He was a better player,” Djokovic said. “But it’s a fact that I just didn’t have any emotional energy left in me.”
Djokovic’s grandfather was buried back home in Serbia on Saturday.
“I’ve never been caught up in this kind of emotional situation before,” Djokovic said. “I’m just happy to reach the finals really under the circumstances. It’s been a very difficult week for me to go through mentally.”
Bolton’s Muamba speaks: ‘I’m very much alive’
LONDON — English soccer player Fabrice Muamba calls his recovery “more than a miracle” in his first interview since going into cardiac arrest during a match. He still doesn’t know if he will play again.
The Bolton midfielder’s heart stopped beating during last month’s FA Cup match at Tottenham, but he was able to walk out of the hospital earlier this week and return home.
“For 78 minutes I was dead and, even if I lived, was expected to have suffered brain damage,” Muamba told Sunday’s edition of The Sun newspaper. “But I’m very much alive and sitting here talking now. Someone up there was watching over me.”
The 24-year-old Muamba collapsed on the field 41 minutes into the match at White Hart Lane.
“I felt very slightly dizzy. It wasn’t normal dizziness — it was a kind of surreal feeling, like I was running along inside someone else’s body,” Muamba said. “I had no pain whatsoever. No clutching at my chest or tightness like you see when people have heart attacks in movies. Just an odd feeling that’s impossible to explain. Then I started to see double. It was almost like a dream.”
Muamba praised Andrew Deaner, the cardiologist who left his seat at the match to help medics treat the player.
Ellis Coleman earns
bid to London Games
IOWA CITY, Iowa — American wrestler Ellis Coleman is taking “The Flying Squirrel” to London.
The 20-year-old Coleman is anxious to show the world there’s a lot more to him than just one crazy move.
Coleman, best known for an unorthodox flip move over opponents, beat Joe Betterman in the 60-kilogram Greco-Roman division to earn a trip to the London Games on Sunday night in the U.S. Olympic Team Trials.
Jake Herbert, Jared Frayer, Tervel Dlagnev, Ben Proviso and Sam Hazewinkel also claimed spots on the U.S. team.
Clarissa Chun became the first American woman to qualify for the Olympics, and Elena Pirozhkova made the team for the first time.
Henry Cejudo, who won a freestyle gold medal in Beijing in 2008, lost to Nick Simmons in the semifinals earlier Sunday and promptly retired.
Coleman didn’t need to break out the move — made famous when he did a standing flip over his opponent, grabbed him by the waist and tossed him to the mat at last year’s Junior World Championships — to upset the top-seeded Betterman, whose clinics he used to take part in when he was younger.
Soni, Shanteau,
Clary win swim titles
MISSION VIEJO, Calif. — Olympic silver medalist Rebecca Soni won the 100-meter breaststroke by 2.14 seconds, and Olympian Eric Shanteau took the men’s race, while Tyler Clary won his third title Sunday on the final day of the Fran Crippen Memorial Swim Meet of Champions.
Soni won in 1 minute, 7.43 seconds, adding the 100 title to the 200 breaststroke she won a night earlier at the tuneup meet for the U.S. Olympic trials in June. Rival Jessica Hardy qualified for the final, but scratched after swimming a preliminary time of 1:07.93. Hardy also made the 100 butterfly final, but scratched that too, concluding a busy meet in which she won the 50 and 100 freestyles and was second in the 200 free.
Shanteau won the men’s 100 breast in 1:01.47, completing a sweep of the breaststroke events. Mike Alexandrov was second at 1:01.84. Ed Moses, silver medalist in the 100 at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, finished last in the eight-man field at 1:04.68. It was slower than his preliminary time as the 31-year-old swimmer attempts a comeback for the London Games.
Clary won the 200 individual medley in 2:00.20 to go with his earlier wins in the 200 fly and 200 backstroke, along with a second in the 200 free.
By wire sources
