HISTORIC rugby club Wasps have confirmed plans to build a new 28,000-seater stadium.

The six-time Premiership winners have bought land at a site in Swanley in Sevenoaks – two years after going into administration.

2

2

Advertisement

They were relegated from the top flight in 2022 and thrown out of the league.

But they have applied for entry to the Tier 2 division – which is replacing the Championship from next year.

And now Wasps have revealed they have an option on the 10-year site which they hope will play host to their new ground.

They announced the news with a picture of a glistening state-of-the-art stadium.

Wasps previously held home games at a number of different football stadiums including those owned by QPR, Wycombe and Coventry.

Wasps owner Christopher Holland told Sky Sports: “It’s very rewarding that we have managed to achieve this milestone with the support of key stakeholders.

“It brings our aspiration of a new home in the region closer and hopefully demonstrates our determination to recover Wasps sustainably.”

Wasps confirmed during the development process they will be “exploring temporary facilities”.

CASINO SPECIAL – BEST CASINO WELCOME OFFERS

The rugby team have already agreed a deal to train and play matches at Worcester Warriors’ Sixways ground.

In 2014 they purchased Coventry City’s football stadium, where they played home matches.

But following Wasps’ bankruptcy, that ground is now owned by Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group.

It has been reported that Wasps could temporarily move back to London and share The Valley with League One side Charlton.

That would mean three teams playing at the same venue, as Charlton’s women’s team have also held home games there since the start of the season.

Tom Aspinall obliged a unique autograph request ahead of UFC 309.

The interim heavyweight champion is in New York for fight week as he prepares to weigh in as the backup for Saturday’s main event featuring Jon Jones defending his share of the heavyweight title against Stipe Miocic. In the lead-up to the fight, much has been made of Aspinall’s attempts to secure a future unification bout with Jones or Miocic, with neither committing to competing again after this weekend much less guaranteeing they will fight Aspinall.

During his visit to “The Big Apple,” Aspinall had a humorous interaction with a fan sympathetic to the cause. Aspinall posted a video to his Instagram Stories showing the fan asking him to sign a rubber duck that just so happened to have Jones’ name on it, a reference to Jones “ducking” the British star.

Watch the scene below (h/t Championship Rounds).

“Wild place New York,” Aspinall wrote on the video.

Though Jones and Aspinall are not scheduled to fight, tensions between the two have been at an all-time high. Jones—the greatest fighter in the history of the light heavyweight division and arguably the best pound-for-pound fighter of all time—won a vacant heavyweight title with a dominant submission of Ciryl Gane at UFC 285, but was unable to defend his title in a scheduled bout against Miocic at UFC 295 after suffering a pectoral injury.

In Jones’ absence, Aspinall defeated Sergei Pavlovich to claim an interim title and has already successfully defended it once, while Jones and Miocic have remained focused on their duel that was re-booked for Nov. 16.

Jones has given a number of reasons for not acknowledging Aspinall’s suggestion of a unification bout, most recently saying Aspinall is “such an assh*le that I don’t want to do business with him.”

Red Bull was concerned about being portrayed as the “villain” in the new Formula 1 film, co-producer Jerry Bruckheimer has revealed.

The upcoming F1 movie has seen heavy involvement from the real-world paddock, with filming continuing to take place on grand prix weekends, including at the recent Mexico City Grand Prix where star Brad Pitt was pictured waving to fans.

The cars used for the fictional APXGP feature F1 bodywork bolted to F2 machinery, with Mercedes having created the unique vehicles.

Due to this involvement, the black-and-gold cars feature Mercedes and AMG logos, something that led to rival teams, including Red Bull, fearing how they would be portrayed in the production.

In conversation with outgoing Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei at the 2024 Investor Day event in New York, Bruckheimer said: “The interesting part is that, since we teamed up with Mercedes, the other teams said ‘wait a second, this movie is going to be about Mercedes and we’re going to look bad’.

“Red Bull said ‘we’re going to be the villains’. It took us three years to convince them that they weren’t going to be the villains and we finally got to a place where all the teams are really leaning into us to really help us.”

When the title of the film was revealed in July, it was met with a mixed reaction, with it branded as either alienating or a good piece of marketing by our writers.

Brad Pitt

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Advertisement

Asked why this simplistic titling was important, Bruckheimer said: “Because the greatest racing movies were Le Mans and Grand Prix, and now there’s going to be F1.”

F1 has a release date of 25 June 2025 in the UK but details on where the global premiere will take place remain unconfirmed with Bruckheimer joking, “That’s up for discussion.”

When Maffei said, “I thought we had an idea. I thought I knew, but OK,” Bruckheimer added:

“I think we’re going to show it to the drivers and to the F1 teams in Monaco and then we’ll have premieres in New York, London and a bunch of other cities.

“Brad is really invested in this movie. He doesn’t like to do press but I think we’ll take him on a world tour where he’ll be glad to show his efforts in driving and acting in this movie.”

Both Van Poortvliet and Steward, known to Borthwick from his time at Leicester Tigers, were regular starters last year.

However, scrum-half Van Poortvliet suffered a tournament-ending injury before a ball was kicked at the World Cup, while Furbank took over the number 15 jersey from Steward during this year’s Six Nations.

“Jack is a player that was playing a lot of games for England prior to the World Cup in 2023 and then had that nasty injury,” Borthwick told BBC Radio 5 Live.

“He has worked exceptionally hard to come back from that.

“He had a couple of niggles last season and probably wasn’t quite at 100% but from what I have seen in training the last couple of weeks, the speed of ball Jack brings to the attacking game is exceptional and he is right up to his very best.”

England have shown signs of progress in their attacking intent and have led late on in each of their past four defeats.

Borthwick’s plan of kicking for both the posts and territory in a controlled performance nearly paid dividends against the Boks at the World Cup before a late Handre Pollard penalty denied them a spot in back-to-back finals.

The inclusion of Steward – a reassuring presence in the backfield and under the high ball – suggests England could be planning to kick for the skies to stifle their visitors and play for territory.

Borthwick added: “It is the right time to bring Freddie in for this game. He has trained really well and played really well for his club so far this season. George is available and I’m pleased with what he has done in the last couple of weeks but I felt it was a physical game for him last week.

“South Africa kick more contestable kicks than anybody else in the world. It means you have to be very good under the high ball and have to be good in chasing the high ball.”

Van Poortvliet, meanwhile, is a strong box-kicker and will try to manoeuvre England into better areas on the field as well as spotting opportunities to throw the ball wide for Marcus Smith to threaten the gainline.

The home crowd has yearned for more attacking rugby in recent weeks and, although England have gone some way towards delivering that, perhaps the best opportunity to get over the line against the world champions is to revert to type and play a controlled game.

Bob Pockrass

FOX NASCAR Insider

Tony Stewart has spent the past couple of years training himself to drive a car that goes from 0 to 330 mph in a matter of seconds.

He’ll admit that it took him a while for his brain to process information as quickly as required in a dragster. Does that mean he can process everything quickly, now?

He’s not sure. Ask the three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion about processing changing diapers, and he laughs about what his next challenge in the upcoming days.

“I’m trying to find every and any way I can to get out of having to change diapers,” Stewart said in an interview a few weeks ago. “But my wife is a very strong-willed woman, and she has assured me that I am not, under any circumstances, getting out of these responsibilities as a father and a parent.

“And I don’t blame her. It’s part of it.”

Stewart’s wife, Leah, is due in the next couple of weeks and the pending birth is the most exciting thing in the life of the NASCAR Hall of Fame driver. When they decided they wanted to start a family, Leah opted to step out of her top fuel car and Stewart, still a relative newbie in the drag racing world, stepped in.

It hasn’t been easy. Like any competitor, Stewart wants to consistently vie for wins. But he has embraced this new racing life. His NASCAR racing days in the rear-view mirror, Stewart has found joy in the challenge of competing in a totally new discipline where the car goes from 0 to 100 mph in 60 feet on its way to a top speed of 334 mph. 

“The car is going down the race track, and your brain’s behind it going, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on? And how do I get caught up?’” Stewart said. “But like anything else — if you want to lift weights, you’ve got to work up to it. Your brain has the ability to do exactly the same thing. It is caught up now in the car.

“I know what the car is doing. If it moves, I know where it’s at. I know what to do to respond to it, but it took a while for my brain to get used to processing information as fast as it’s happening in a dragster.”

Heading into this weekend’s National Hot Rod Association season finale at the Pomona (Calif.) Dragstrip, Stewart sits 10th in the standings, having failed to advance out of the first round in 10 of 19 events this year. He has made the finals once, with his best finish a runner-up at Sonoma. He is a candidate for Rookie of the Year, but the season hasn’t gone as well as he wished.

“I’d like to say it’s going great,” Stewart said. “But it’s been a struggle this year. … . It was a big learning curve for me as a driver, for the team and the crew to tune the car to sit there and figure out how to make the car run better and perform the way that they need to perform.”

Stewart spent one year racing a top alcohol dragster and this year moved to the top fuel category. He has three victories in the top alcohol division.

“I thought at the beginning of the season that I, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was going to be the weak link of the team,” Stewart said. “I felt like the team was going to be better suited to win rounds and try to win races than I was going to be capable of at that time.

“Luckily, I’ve got a great wife that’s a great teacher, and I got up to speed fairly quickly on what I need to do as a driver to drive the car. We’ve just struggled.”

For Stewart, it’s the mindset that is the biggest difference between his former racing life and current one. He was used to 3.5-hour races. Now he does races in 3.5 seconds. 

“I’d say on the sprint car and the NASCAR side of things. the driver usually ends up being 70 percent of the equation of the success of it,” Stewart said. “That’s because of what they do with their hands and feet in the car, and where they’re lifting and how they’re driving the race car.

“They can manipulate the race car a little bit to a certain degree and make up for what it’s not doing that they need it to do. The NHRA side is opposite of that. It’s 70 percent of the tuners and 30 percent the drivers, There’s nothing I can do as a driver to make it go faster, but there’s about 20 ways every run that I can screw it up and slow it down or cause something catastrophic with the engine.”

Among the challenges were a change in chassis specs that no one knew how they would impact the performance. And then there was something else.

“Obviously, you know, not having Leah in the car and adding a driver that’s a little heavier in the race car, we knew that would be a factor to some degree, just not sure how big of a factor that was going to be,” Stewart said.

Stewart doesn’t know whether he will run in place of his wife at the start of next season. The NHRA has adopted rules for how points would be allocated if a driver uses a substitute driver for part of a season because of a driver’s pregnancy or fertility treatment. Those rules would allow, in certain situations, for the points earned by the replacement driver to go to the primary driver’s season total.

“Obviously I’m not a woman, and I have no idea what childbirth is like and what it takes to recover from that,” Stewart said. “I’m learning more and reading more about it, and it’s not an easy journey to get back to the forum before you get pregnant.

“We’re still trying to figure that out, but it’s ultimately going to be Leah’s decision. The reason I’m driving the car this year is because I’m just the replacement driver. I’ve told everyone, I’ll drive the car until she’s ready to come back. It is ultimately her race car and her race team, and when she wants to get back in that car, it’s going to be sitting there for her.”

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.

Get more from NASCAR Cup Series Follow your favorites to get information about games, news and more

in this topic

Tony Stewart

TIGER WOODS’ Olympic champ ex-girlfriend Lindsey Vonn has come out of retirement aged 40.

The American retired in February 2019 but has announced her competitive comeback having had successful knee surgery in April.

6

6

Advertisement

Vonn admitted she was plotting a return to skiing in July.

It has now been revealed she will mark her return to competition, following a five-year absence, at the World Cup opener in Solden, Austria.

The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Organisation announced that Vonn would be actively competing again following several injuries.

She celebrated the news in an Instagram post where she showed off a video of her skiing.

Her beaming caption read: “Well, it’s off to Colorado…. I hope the @usskiteam uniform still fits…”

Away from the sport, Vonn’s fame has been boosted by posing nude and her much-publicised love life.

In 2013, Vonn became part of a sporting power coupe when she began dating golfer Woods, who she met at a charity event a year earlier.

She was often seen on the PGA Tour cheering her beau, until they broke up in 2015.

6

BEST FREE BET SIGN UP OFFERS FOR UK BOOKMAKERS

Woods later said of split: “Well, with Lindsey, what was hard is we never had time together.

“And I can’t travel because I have the kids—my off weeks, I’m devoted to my kids—and I have to be here.”

Vonn is a three-time Olympic medallist, including gold in downhill skiing at the Winter Games in Vancouver in 2010.

She also took bronze in the Super-G in Canada.

She later claimed another downhill bronze in Pyeongchang in 2018.

In 2011, Vonn received the Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year award.

After Woods, Vonn was linked with NFL coach Kenan Smith, and dated NHL star P.K. Subban.

She looked set to marry the ice hockey star, when they got engaged, bought a £5.2million Beverly Hills home together.

However, they announced their surprising split on Instagram in 2020.

Since 2021, Vonn has been dating Diego Osorio, co-founder of tequila company Lobos 1707, which received investment from LeBron James.

6

6

6