Newsflash: 27th June - Last drinks for Arkea - B&B? And No Tao in the Tour.. Again
The Tour de France start list has taken more hits. Tao Geoghegan Hart (Lidl-Trek) and David Gaudu (Groupama-FDJ) have withdrawn, as both were unable to regain their race form in time. Benoît Cosnefroy also remains sidelined, further thinning the French hopes at their home Grand Tour.
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Courier-Mail
3 hours ago
- Courier-Mail
Rally champion, Molly Taylor, on extreme sports, resilience and learning from the best
The Extreme E champion and trailblazing rally car driver on family legacy, resilience and visibility in motorsport. You are an Extreme E champion and rally car driver, competing in electric off-road racing events in extreme locations. Tell us a bit more about your sport and how you got into it. I got involved through my family. My mum is actually a co-driver. In rally, one of the biggest differences is that you have two people in the car - a driver and a co-driver. It's a bit more like if you imagine the Tour de France and all the different stages that add up over the course of a weekend or a week. We're in the forest, driving over various stages of forest roads rather than a race track itself. But Mum is a six-time Australian Rally Champion as a co-driver, she's the most successful co-driver in the history of Australian rally which is pretty cool. Extreme E is a newer form of off-road which is a bit like a combination of rallycross. You're driving head-to-head, you've got five cars on the same start line and a shorter track with one driver in the car. It's like a combination of a circuit but it's off-road, so you're driving through the desert like in Saudi or gravel, rocky terrain like in Sardinia. You're driving head-to-head and then you switch drivers half-way through, so one male, one female co-driver sharing this big, two tonne all-electric, off-road SUV. Both are very different to Formula 1 and supercars and all of that, but the biggest difference is that everything we do is off-road and in the dirt. Your mum, Coral Taylor, dominated the sport as a six-time Australian Rally Champion co-driver. How did watching her success in the sport shape your own ambitions and your understanding of what's possible? Growing up, I was obsessed with horses. I went to rally events and loved it but didn't really think about getting involved. My Dad also rallied and he wanted us to go to a rally school that he was running on weekends just to learn car control and know how to drive a car well from a road safety point of view. That was when I got the opportunity to drive a rally car, so it was then that the penny dropped and I experienced how much fun it was. I was 16 when I started which was late when you look at someone trying to make a career out of their sport. But the influence of Mum certainly had an impact that I didn't realise. Growing up, I always saw that that could be a path for a woman. So, when I did it and was like, 'Wow, this is really cool, maybe I should do this a bit more,' I didn't have to overcome that 'all I see are boys doing it' mentality. You still go through all the same struggles and it's not easy, but I think I had a massive opportunity in that my eyes were open and my mind was open from the very beginning. Now, when we do an Extreme E or international-level event, you realise how important it is at a high level to have the visibility of what's possible because we only have less females now because we have even less females starting out at grassroots sport because young girls aren't seeing that that's an option. I don't think it's necessarily people saying, 'This isn't a sport for girls,' but if you're five or six and not seeing anyone else like you doing it, you just naturally don't gravitate towards it. There's a long way to go but it's kind of cool and I guess I just fast-tracked that because I always had an amazing role model. What have you learned most from her - on or off the track? I often joke when I did get started, 'Why didn't you push me into this and show me how fun it was?' But it's such a tough sport and there are so many highs and lows, it really requires sacrificing everything in pursuit of that and still the chance to make it through are so low that if that drive doesn't come from within you, it will never be enough to make it. If you've been pushed or are only doing it because your parents do, at some point it's going to get really hard and you're going to go, 'I don't want to do it enough.' My parents have really understood that and instilled that whatever we want to do, as long as we had a burning desire for something and chased it, but it was up to us to find what that was. But in saying that, now that I am involved, it's awesome to share it with my parents because there are so many times you lean on them for advice or they've been through a similar situation and can say the right thing. I think in most family relationships, you're always telling your Mum that she's saying the wrong thing. Someone else can give you the same advice as your Mum and you'll take it, but when it comes from your Mum you don't listen. But I would say more often than not, it's amazing to have someone who has been there and can keep you on the straight and narrow when things are getting tough or you're in a tricky situation and they can keep you grounded and keep you focused on what's important. In the car, you take on speeds of up to 200km/hr, make split decisions, and face cabin temperatures of up to 60 degrees. What does your physical training involve to handle such extremes? It is extreme, we don't have air conditioning in the car or anything. In Extreme E the races are relatively short and in rally it can be up to 30 or 40 minutes at any one time but you might do ten stages during the day. If you look at the Dakar rally, you're in the car for 12 hours a day. We're sliding around a lot, so you need good core strength. But it's more about how you can be fit enough and strong enough so you can maintain 100 per cent mental clarity when it's 60 degrees in the car and you've been going all day, you've just had to jump out and change a tyre and jump back in and your heart rate is up. When you start to fatigue, the first thing you drop is your mental clarity. A lot of the training is more focused around not losing that focus and not getting distracted. As a female, I spend more time working on strength and endurance than the average guy because it takes a bit longer to build that muscle mass. A lot of that is upper body and core. There's also cardio endurance, so running and biking. Getting in the car is obviously the best training and it's a really weird sport in that it's like being a professional tennis player and you're about to go to the Australian Open, but in the months leading up to it you never picked up a tennis racquet, then the day before you picked up the racquet for an hour or two. For us, that's sort of what we do. You're out of the car for a month or two, then you hop in and have one practice session and then you're in the competition. It's wild how little prep time you get. But it's everything from whether you can do simulator, watch videos or do visualisation, whatever you can to practice those things. But the biggest challenge in our sport is getting the opportunity and putting together the resources to get seat practice. The more sponsorship and resources you can put together to get in the car, the more you practice and the better you can be. Crashes and tough moments are an inevitable part of motorsports. When things haven't gone to plan, what mental tools or strategies help you reset and get back in the car with confidence? I think in motorsport a lot of the time, if you look at the averages, it's probably not going to go your way a lot more than it will. It's really hard to perfect everything because especially in our environment, everything's always different and the road is always changing. It's very hard to nail everything perfectly and know there's nowhere to improve, so you're always chasing that. When you're trying to drive something right on the limit of grip and not go over it, when you're in that dynamic environment it's inevitable that you'll sometimes go over it. And if you never go over it or you never crash, then you're not going fast enough because you shouldn't have this huge buffer to always eliminate this risk. When you do go over that, you try not to and you don't want to get yourself in that situation, but it is part of the process. I suppose in any other sport, the consequences aren't as big. How many goals do you kick in practice and you don't get them all in? As long as you understand what happened, how you can learn from it so you don't do it again, or change something or put something in place, it's just about going back and getting on. You just have to focus on the process and the moment you start thinking about other things, the more likely you are to get yourself in that scenario. In 2016, you were then the youngest winner of the Australian Rally Championship - and the first (and to-date only) female champion. How did you stay focused and motivated after reaching such a massive career milestone so young? We say young but I was 27, so it's kind of wild that in a lot of sporting careers you're getting towards the end of your sporting life. Rally is different like that. I started when I was 16 and that was my first year as a professional driver with Subaru, so it was 11 years of doing whatever I could to drive and get opportunities and pour everything I earned into making that happen. That was my first year of just doing it as a job so it was incredible for it all to come together. I think it just fuels the motivation, you don't just tick it off and go, 'Ok, cool, I'm done.' It's like, 'Now we're getting started.' It's a bit of a drug, really. The more you do, the more you want to do and that's the thing with motorsport. It's really challenging and the hardest thing, but along with the lowest moments you'll ever have come the highest moments. In 2021, you won the inaugural Extreme E championship - a series that's as much about impact as it is about racing. Why was it important to you to be part of a series that's changing the future of motorsport? When I saw what they were doing, it was incredibly exciting. Off-road is my wheelhouse and it was cool that this opportunity was coming up in this space. It had come off the back of competing overseas, losing my sponsorship over there, coming back and having the opportunity to be a professional driver with Subaru, then Covid happened and the rally program stopped and that was when this opportunity was just coming up. The whole philosophy behind it - you're taking Motorsport, which we've grown up loving and our passion - but it's such an integral part of the development of the automotive world, it's always been since they first built cars; they were racing them and what they learned on the track they were putting them into road cars. With the electrification and need for sustainability, how can motorsport help be part of that future and how can we use what we do and pushing things to the limits and racing each other, how can we use that and the platform of everyone who wants to watch that and the power you have through that to also educate and develop technologies. It's about racing with purpose, and how you can use your passion to be part of something positive for the future and the evolution of not just the sport, but automatives and sustainability. It's pretty compelling when you think you grew up just loving driving and trying to drive as fast as you can, but now you can take that skill to be part of something as big as that which is a huge opportunity. From an equality side as well, to be given that opportunity with the 50-50 male-female driver split, not only for my professional development, but for the visibility and impact that can have on future generations, there were lots of reasons why it was a no-brainer to be involved. Extreme E has made headlines for its gender-equal team structure, where men and women share driving duties equally. What was it like to race in a format where equality is built into the rules? I think it's probably the best case study of how that can be done at an international level of motorsport. To get access to seat time and the resources to do that and the money that's involved, it's really difficult, so the more opportunities you're given, the more of a chance you have to improve and be better. These world-class international teams now have to invest in female talent, find the best talent, and it's in their interest to help develop the opportunities to drive because they're contributing 50 percent of the on-track time. Then you have your teammates. They're picking the world's best off-road male drivers, they are my teammates, these hugely talented drivers, so you also have the best mentor you could ever wish for to learn from. I think what's been really compelling about that whole thing is that in the first three seasons of Extreme E, the performance gap from the females to the hugely experienced male drivers has closed 70 percent. It just proves that if you provide the opportunity, the potential for performance is there. I think keys to that are having that benchmark and competing with them, not separating it, means you're learning from the best and always know where you stand, and now we're seeing some laps where the females are faster so you can see what's possible. We still have more development to go but they took that opportunity and put their money where their mouth was and it's been cool to see what has happened and the impact of that for more young girls getting involved, too. You've broken records, raced on almost every terrain imaginable, and continue to make history. What do you hope to achieve next? The most immediate one is that now with Extreme E converting to Extreme H - so it will be the world's first hydrogen motorsport series - with that starting up this year, the immediate goal is to try and win that title as well. We did some rallies in the Australian rally championship last year, but to get back and do a full campaign, to get back to the top of the ARC has always been my dream for as long as I'm able to drive a car so I'd love to have another crack at that. Originally published as Rally champion, Molly Taylor, on extreme sports, resilience and learning from the best
ABC News
a day ago
- ABC News
England name 21-year-old Jacob Bethell as captain for T20 International series against Ireland
Jacob Bethell will break a record which has stood for 136 years when the 21-year-old all-rounder becomes England's youngest ever men's cricket captain next month. Bethell will lead England against Ireland in three T20 Internationals in Dublin. The previous youngest England captain was Monty Bowden, who was 23 in 1889 when he took charge for a Test in South Africa after regular skipper Aubrey Smith fell ill with fever. Some senior players will be missing in Ireland, including usual white-ball captain Harry Brook, who will be in charge of one-day international and T20I games against visiting South Africa earlier in September. "Jacob Bethell has impressed with his leadership qualities ever since he has been with the England squads, and the series against Ireland will provide him with the opportunity to further develop those skills on the international stage," England men's selector Luke Wright said in a statement on Friday. The captaincy is part of a rapid rise for Bethell, who made his debuts for England in all three formats only last year. The series in Ireland begins on September 17, after England's tour of South Africa for three One-Day Internationals (ODI) and three T20 matches, starting September 2. Right-arm fast bowler Sonny Baker has earned his first national team call-up for the ODIs against South Africa after the 22-year-old impressed selectors with his performance for England Lions and in domestic cricket. England will then travel to New Zealand in October for a white-ball tour, followed by five Ashes Tests in Australia from November. AP/Reuters
The Australian
a day ago
- The Australian
New-look Liverpool kick off Premier League season after spending spree
Reigning champions Liverpool kick off the Premier League season on Friday with Europe's richest league strengthened by a remarkable £2 billion ($2.7 billion) spending splurge. Liverpool will include £100 million midfield signing Florian Wirtz and new forward Hugo Ekitike in their squad to face Bournemouth at Anfield, among a handful of new recruits. They are favourites to retain their crown but the unknown factor is the potential effect of the tragic death of Portuguese forward Diogo Jota in a car crash in Spain in July. Arsenal, one club hoping to topple Liverpool, face an immediate test of their title credentials against a revamped Manchester United on Sunday. Newcastle are set to be without unsettled star striker Alexander Isak for a tough trip to Aston Villa -- the Swede is wanted by Liverpool. Here are several issues to watch on the opening weekend: Big-spending Liverpool seek harmony Liverpool have changed their careful shopping habits and suddenly outspent their rivals, overhauling a squad fresh from winning the league. Only once since 2007, when Manchester City did it in 2019, have the Premier League champions been the biggest-spending English club in the market. A spree that has already seen Liverpool's US owners approve £260 million on Wirtz, Ekitike and defenders Jeremie Frimpong and Milos Kerkez, is far from over with Isak and Crystal Palace captain Marc Guehi linked with moves to Anfield. Trent Alexander-Arnold, Luis Diaz and Darwin Nunez have been sold. The transition has shown teething problems in pre-season with a slick attack let down by a porous defence. Manager Arne Slot is confident his side are ready as they seek to retain the title for the first time since 1984. "I think we've lost five to six players that played quite a lot of minutes for us last season and we brought in four new ones, so then it's normal that there's a little bit of adaptation," said Slot. "But we are definitely ready for the league to start." Sesko and Gyokeres seek scoring start Benjamin Sesko and Viktor Gyokeres are set to make their Premier League debuts for United and Arsenal respectively at Old Trafford after a summer that could have seen them line up the other way on Sunday. Arsenal were linked with a move to Sesko for over a year before deciding to bet on Gyokeres as the man to fire them to a first Premier League title since 2004 for a fee that could rise to £66 million. The Gunners have finished second for the past three seasons, lacking a clinical finisher to take that final step towards being champions Gyokeres netted a remarkable 97 times in 102 games in two years at Sporting Lisbon, much of which came under United's now-manager Ruben Amorim. Instead of being reunited with the Swede, Amorim has overhauled his attack with the signings of Sesko, Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha at a combined cost of over £200 million. United, one of the world's richest clubs, had to spend big after their worst season since being relegated in 1974. In Amorim's first year in charge, the Red Devils finished 15th in the Premier League and failed to qualify for Europe, losing the Europa League final. Both clubs desperately need a fast start and the battle between the two new number nines will go a long way to deciding the outcome. Villa and Newcastle chase 'big six' As the Premier League's traditional "big six" of Liverpool, Manchester City, United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham have flexed their financial muscle in the transfer market, Villa and Newcastle have been squeezed out. Constrained by the need to meet financial sustainability rules, Villa's only major signing has been Ivorian stiker Evann Guessand from Nice. Newcastle boss Eddie Howe has had to field constant questions about Isak, who sat out pre-season preparations in a bid to force through a move to Liverpool. Despite having Saudi owners, the Magpies' attempts to replace the Swede have repeatedly fallen down, with most of their targets going elsewhere. But both Villa and Newcastle have consistently outperformed some of the "big six" in recent seasons and will be targeting Champions League qualification again this season. kca/gj/pb
