Finn Russell ready for bruising clash with Scotland colleagues against Edinburgh

Finn Russell is braced for a potentially bruising reunion with his Scottish international teammates but is intent on winning the “bragging rights” when Bath host Edinburgh on Friday in their Champions Cup pool decider. Russell has already messaged Duhan van der Merwe to warn him to expect a tough night and says the English champions are seeking to sharpen their attacking game in pursuit of a crucial home draw for the knockout phase.With the victorious side at the Rec set to top pool 2, the Scottish playmaker is anticipating a physical examination from an Edinburgh team he knows extremely well. “I’d imagine there’ll be a couple of late shots and being held on the ground which is always the case when you’re against your old side,” said Russell, who spent the first half of his professional career at Glasgow.“I’m not sure what the weather will be like but if it’s like it is now there’ll be a lot of balls going up in the air

Sport England suspends X social media account and takes aim at Elon Musk

Sport England has revealed that it has suspended its account on X, because the social media platform “­increasingly promotes and monetises an environment that is hostile to women and girls”.In a blog post explaining the ­decision the Sport England chair, Chris Boardman, criticised X’s AI platform tool, Grok, saying it had “contributed to the amplification of and worse, normalisation of, misogynistic content”.“That runs directly counter to what we stand for,” said Boardman, who sits at the heart of a funding agency that invests £250m a year in grassroots sport and community projects. Regarding the decision to withdraw from X, he also pointed to the fact members of the England ­women’s football squad were attacked on the platform last summer. “Sport should always be a place where everyone feels safe and welcome,” he said

Ian Balding obituary

The racehorse trainer Ian Balding, who has died aged 87, saddled 1,755 winners on the flat, of which 123 were in Group races of the highest class. Yet across his four-decade career there was one horse that stood out above all others – the great Mill Reef, who won the Derby and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 1971.Like most trainers worth their salt, Balding was prepared to acknowledge his good fortune in coming across such an extraordinary horse. But even though Mill Reef was special from the outset, the colt still had to be expertly managed.After winning the Greenham Stakes at Newbury in April 1971 and then the Derby at Epsom with ease that June, the three-year-old Mill Reef, ridden by Geoff Lewis, progressed to win the Eclipse Stakes and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes in the following months, before going on to tackle the Arc at the conclusion of a very long season in October

Frustrated Raducanu held up by rain with match suspended overnight in Hobart

Emma Raducanu cut a frustrated figure on Tuesday at the Hobart International as her first round match was suspended for the night due to rain with the Briton struggling to hold on to her precarious 6-3, 2-4 lead against Camila Osorio of Colombia.Raducanu, the top seed in Hobart, will return to the court on Wednesday afternoon hoping to close out her first win of the season. She lost her only match of 2026 to Maria Sakkari at the United Cup mixed-team competition last week. Afterwards, Raducanu explained how her pre-season had been badly disrupted by the foot injury she had been struggling with since she prematurely ended her 2025 season in October. The 22-year-old only began to play points and move properly in her training sessions once she arrived in Australia at the end of December

Team GB target record-breaking medal haul at 2026 Winter Olympics

Team GB believe they can achieve “the greatest Olympic performance we have ever seen at a winter Games” and are targeting a record-breaking eight medals next month in Milan-Cortina.That bullish prediction is significantly higher than Britain’s previous best of five medals, secured in Sochi in 2014 and Pyeongchang in 2018. And while the Covid-affected Games in Beijing in 2022 were a disappointment, with just two curling medals, officials are confident the team can soar to fresh heights in Italy.“We are in the strongest position we have ever been going into a Games from a world championship performance perspective,” said Dr Kate Baker, director of performance and people at UK Sport. “There is lots to be excited about

40 years on, did Proposition 48 protect US college sports – or punish Black athletes?

When the NCAA tied eligibility to standardized test scores in 1986, hundreds of recruits were barred from competition. But its legacy is still a subject of debateTony Rice noticed the looks and smirks during his first week of freshman classes in the fall of 1986 at Notre Dame.He had accepted his fate a few months earlier when standardized test results led to the decision that he would not be eligible to participate in collegiate sports his freshman year. But nothing prepared him for this.“People were looking at me,” Rice says