logo
Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman join Australia SailGP team as co-owners

Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman join Australia SailGP team as co-owners

Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman become co-owners of the Australia SailGP team on Thursday.
The 'Deadpool & Wolverine' stars joined driver and CEO Tom Slingsby in leading the team's rebrand after several successful seasons, winning three championships in its four seasons. The team will be called the BONDS Flying Roos, with the Australian underwear company BONDS as its title partner.
'We're incredibly excited to set sail together in this new adventure,' Reynolds and Jackman said in a joint statement released through SailGP. 'Hugh brings a deep love for and pride in his home country, as well as being an avid fan of sailing. He will also be bringing his overly clingy emotional support human along for the ride. Apologies in advance to Australia. No comment on whether we're writing this in our BONDS. No further questions.'
It's the latest sports venture for Reynolds, who along with fellow Hollywood actor Rob McElhenney is a co-owner of Wrexham, one of the world's oldest soccer clubs. Reynolds and McElhenney were also part of an investment group that acquired Colombian club La Equidad earlier this year.
The BONDS Flying Roos SailGP Team is expected to make its debut at the Mubadala New York Sail Grand Prix starting June 7.
Slingsby, an Olympic gold medalist, said in a release that Jackman and Reynolds bring 'unmatched star power, a love for storytelling, and a sharp sense of (humor) that fits perfectly with our team.'
'With BONDS joining as our Title Partner and the launch of the BONDS Flying Roos,' Slingsby added, 'we're building something distinctly Australian; a team driven by spirit, resilience, and national pride.'
___
AP sports: https://apnews.com/sports

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Key moments from the fourth week of Sean 'Diddy' Combs' sex trafficking trial
Key moments from the fourth week of Sean 'Diddy' Combs' sex trafficking trial

Associated Press

time41 minutes ago

  • Associated Press

Key moments from the fourth week of Sean 'Diddy' Combs' sex trafficking trial

NEW YORK (AP) — The fourth week of Sean 'Diddy' Combs ' sex trafficking trial featured testimony from the second of two ex-girlfriends who are crucial witnesses in the government's quest to prove sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges against the hip-hop mogul. Combs, the founder of Bad Boy Records, has pleaded not guilty in the trial, which resumes Monday. Here are key moments from the past week: Hotel worker says Combs sought video of Cassie beating Fearing career ruin, Combs delivered $100,000 in cash to a security guard for a Los Angeles hotel in return for assurances that he was given the only security footage of Combs' 2016 attack on then-girlfriend Casandra 'Cassie' Ventura, the security guard testified. Eddy Garcia, 33, recounted how the deal came to be, saying he first heard from a fast talking, stuttering and 'very nervous' Combs on a phone call seeking to obtain the video of him kicking and dragging Cassie from the hotel's elevator bank into a hallway because 'if this got out it could ruin him.' Days later, Garcia said, he was the nervous one when he was greeted in an office building by a smiling Combs who called him 'Eddy, my angel' before Garcia turned over a USB drive containing the security footage. Combs then made him sign a nondisclosure agreement promising it was the only copy of the video and that Garcia would never speak of it, he said. Then, Combs, with a bodyguard at his side, fed stacks of cash from a brown bag into a rectangular money counter machine until it reached $100,000, Garcia said. He said he pocketed $30,000 and gave $50,000 to his boss and $20,000 to another hotel security guard. Garcia testified under immunity. A recording of the hotel attack on Cassie aired on CNN last year and security footage along with clips of the security tape recorded by a guard on his personal phone so he could show it to his wife have been shown repeatedly during the trial. Judge threatens Combs with trial expulsion Minutes after a prosecutor complained that Combs was seen 'nodding furiously' as his lawyer cross examined a witness on Thursday, Judge Arun Subramanian took a look himself and said he saw Combs 'nodding vigorously and looking at the jury' and doing the same later when the lawyers and the judge were having a sidebar discussion. Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey said prosecutors were concerned because the gestures amounted to 'testifying by nodding affirmatively' while his lawyer asked questions. During a lunch break, defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo promised to speak with Combs and ensure it wouldn't happen again after the judge told him it was 'absolutely unacceptable.' The judge sternly responded: 'If it happens again, if it happens even once, I will hear an application from the government to give a curative instruction to the jury, which you do not want. Or I will consider taking further measures, which could result in the exclusion of your client from the courtroom.' Mia says she was 'brainwashed' to send Combs loving texts after rape A former Combs personal assistant who testified under the pseudonym 'Mia' told jurors that Combs had sexually assaulted her multiple times over her eight-year career, though the attacks were 'random, sporadic, so oddly spaced out' so that she thought each was the last. She said he first molested her and forcibly kissed her at his 40th birthday party before raping her months later in a guest room at his Los Angeles home. On cross examination, defense lawyer Brian Steel's suggested that she fabricated her claims to cash in on 'the #MeToo money grab against Sean Combs.' Steel confronted her with loving texts she sent Combs long after her employment ended and asked how she could tell him, as she did in a 2019 text, that she had imagined Combs rescuing her from a nightmare in which she was trapped in an elevator with R. Kelly, the singer who has since been convicted of sex trafficking. 'I was still brainwashed,' Mia explained. Defense has success with questioning of Cassie's friend The defense had one of its most successful moments of the trial when attorney Nicole Westmoreland cast doubt on the credibility of a graphic designer who says Combs once dangled her from the balcony of a 17th-floor apartment in Los Angeles. Bryana 'Bana' Bongolan, a friend of Cassie who is suing Combs, had taken a cellphone image of a softball-size welt on her leg that she said occurred when Combs held her over the balcony for 10 to 15 seconds and then threw her into furniture. After it was shown to the jury, Westmoreland showed the jury cellphone metadata revealing that the photograph was taken while Combs was on tour in September 2016, staying at a Manhattan hotel. 'You agree that one person can't be in two places at the same time?' Westmoreland asked. 'In, like, theory, yeah,' Bongolan responded. 'You're not sure?' Westmoreland asked. 'Hard to answer that one,' she said. Later, Bongolan said she did not recall the exact date, but she had no doubt the balcony episode happened. Woman recalls sex performances during three years as a Combs' girlfriend A woman testifying under the pseudonym 'Jane' fought through tears and sobs to recount frequent sexual performances she participated in with male sex workers to please Combs and keep their three-year relationship alive until his September arrest. Jane's testimony, which is likely to continue deep into next week, is identical in many ways to the four-day testimony in the trial's first week by Cassie. Jane said she never wanted to have sex with other men but did it to please Combs because she loved him. Cassie described having hundreds of drug-fueled sexual performances known as 'freak-offs' in which she had sex with male sex workers for days at a time while Combs watched, sometimes directed the activity, and pleasured himself. Jane described having nearly the same experiences from 2021 until last August, though she called them 'hotel nights.' She said her relationship with Combs began with romance but later became reliant upon the sexual performances, especially after Combs began paying rent for her apartment. Defense attorneys have insisted that Jane and Combs only engaged in consensual sex and that Jane's protests to Combs in text messages were fueled by jealousy.

How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers
How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers

Associated Press

time41 minutes ago

  • Associated Press

How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers

NEW YORK (AP) — Andrew Sean Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, remembers the first time he read Edmund White. It was the summer of 1989, he was beginning his second year at Brown University and he had just come out. Having learned that White would be teaching at Brown, he found a copy of White's celebrated coming-of-age novel, 'A Boy's Own Story.' 'I'd never read anything like it — nobody had — and what strikes me looking back is the lack of shame or self-hatred or misery that imbued so many other gay male works of fiction of that time,' says Greer, whose 'Less' won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2018. 'I, of course, did not know then I was reading a truly important literary work. All I knew is I wanted to read more. 'Reading was all we had in those days — the private, unshared experience that could help you explore your private life,' he said. 'Ed invented so many of us.' White, a pioneer of contemporary gay literature, died this week at age 85. He left behind such widely read works as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty' and a gift to countless younger writers: Validation of their lives, the discovery of themselves through the stories of others. Greer and other authors speak of White's work as more than just an influence, but as a rite of passage: 'How a queer man might begin to question all of the deeply held, deeply religious, deeply American assumptions about desire, love, and sex — who is entitled to have it, how it must be had, what it looks like,' says Robert Jones Jr., whose novel above love between two enslaved men, ' The Prophets,' was a National Book Award finalist in 2021. Jones remembers being a teenager in the 1980s when he read 'A Boy's Own Story.' He found the book at a store in a gay neighborhood in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, 'the safest place for a person to be openly queer in New York City,' he said. 'It was a scary time for me because all the news stories about queer men revolved around AIDS and dying, and how the disease was the Christian god's vengeance against the 'sin of homosexuality,'' Jones added. 'It was the first time that I had come across any literature that confirmed that queer men have a childhood; that my own desires were not, in fact, some aberration, but were natural; and that any suffering and loneliness I was experiencing wasn't divine retribution, but was the intention of a human-made bigotry that could be, if I had the courage and the community, confronted and perhaps defeated,' he said. Starting in the 1970s, White published more than 25 books, including novels, memoirs, plays, biographies and 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a response to the 1970s bestseller 'The Joy of Sex.' He held the rare stature for a living author of having a prize named for him, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, as presented by the Publishing Triangle. 'White was very supportive of young writers, encouraging them to explore and expand new and individual visions,' said Carol Rosenfeld, chair of the Triangle. The award was 'one way of honoring that support.' Winners such the prize was founded, in 2006, have included 'The Prophets,' Myriam Gurba 's 'Dahlia Season' and Joe Okonkwo's 'Jazz Moon.' Earlier this year, the award was given to Jiaming Tang's ' Cinema Love,' a story of gay men in rural China. Tang remembered reading 'A Boy's Own Story' in his early 20s, and said that both the book and White were 'essential touchpoints in my gay coming-of-age.' 'He writes with intimate specificity and humor, and no other writer has captured the electric excitement and crushing loneliness that gay men experience as they come of age,' Tang said. 'He's a towering figure. There'd be no gay literature in America without Edmund White.'

SailGP's toughest task lies ahead in one of its more exciting venues: Upper New York Bay
SailGP's toughest task lies ahead in one of its more exciting venues: Upper New York Bay

New York Times

time44 minutes ago

  • New York Times

SailGP's toughest task lies ahead in one of its more exciting venues: Upper New York Bay

The SailGP fleet is steeling itself for one of the most exciting venues of the season. The towering skyline of New York City certainly takes the breath away, but that famous wall of skyscrapers is also quite capable of taking the wind away, too. No sane sailing event would choose to hold a competition on the waters of Upper New York Bay, although Formula One probably shouldn't stage a grand prix on the narrow streets of Monaco, either. Advertisement Love it or loathe it, Upper New York Bay will make for an impressive sporting arena this weekend for the 12-team close-to-shore sailing championship. It's far from a straightforward venue; the wind is likely to be extremely gusty and shifty, making it very hard for the strategists to give a clear call on tactics. Keeping SailGP's identical F50 catamarans, which compete head-to-head, in stable flight is hard enough on an open track, so trying to achieve constant foiling as the breeze swirls off the streets of Manhattan is much more difficult. The F50 will tax the coordination of the 'back three' in each six-person crew — the driver (makes final decisions about steering), wing trimmer (adjusts the wing sail for maximum speed) and flight controller (manages the ride height of the boat above the water). Then again, last year's New York event produced good, steady breezes that took everyone pleasantly by surprise. Though the long-range forecast for this weekend suggests it's going to be softer and flukier in 2025. Practice is always in short supply on the F50s, but it's been more so in recent weeks due to the cancellation of what would have been SailGP's first trip to South America, the Rio Grand Prix, which had been scheduled for early May. Following the catastrophic disintegration of the Australian team's wingsail in the closing stages of the San Francisco Grand Prix in March, the Brazil event had to be canned as designers and engineers were thrown the task of strengthening the wings of all 12 competing F50s. Behind the scenes, there has been a massive effort to have the new wings ready, with the technical work done on both sides of the Atlantic. SailGP Technologies in the English city of Southampton has been assisted by America's Cup team American Magic, who have contributed their people and facilities in Pensacola, Florida, to make sure the fleet is seaworthy and race-ready for New York. Advertisement Each boat has received an upgraded 'main element 1' — the area of the wingsail that bears the most load in racing conditions. SailGP CEO Sir Russell Coutts said in a press release: 'These new components for the wingsails feature an aluminum Nomex core and increased laminate, which means the new shear webs will be approximately twice as strong.' So, assuming the boats hold together, what of the form book for New York? Talking of form books, SailGP has just this week announced its foray into sports betting, with punters now able to gamble on a number of outcomes in the racing. With five different winners from five events so far in Season 5, the field is wide open. Last year, it was New Zealand who continued a good run of form in Season 4 to take victory in New York, and Peter Burling's team also took the opening event of the current season in Dubai last November. Other winners so far have been Australia, Great Britain, Canada and Spain. The points at the top of the leaderboard are extremely tight, with fifth-placed Canada just four points behind leader Australia. As Season 5 approaches its halfway point, the gap between the top and the bottom half of the leaderboard has already opened up. The big five look to be in a different league, although the French are also showing signs of being able to mix it with the best. Perhaps Quentin Delapierre's crew will find that edge of speed that was missing in San Francisco to become the sixth different winner of the season this weekend in New York. Delapierre is trying to remind himself to enjoy the moment while he's in the thick of competition. 'It's a really special place, with the Statue of Liberty behind you, which is pretty cool,' he told The Athletic. 'Along with Saint-Tropez and Sydney, this is one of the most iconic grands prix of the season. We have the opportunity, just before the races, to do 30 minutes of warm-up; it's kind of the only time we can turn our heads and look around. We're literally racing between the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan, in the middle of the ferries, which is just incredible on a boat going close to 100kmh (62mph).' Advertisement As for the contenders on the bottom half of the leaderboard, all local eyes will be on the United States team to see if Taylor Canfield's crew can earn redemption after a lacklustre showing in both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Canfield's third-place finish in Dubai at the end of last year proved the U.S. team display better form in non-foiling conditions. So a light-wind, funky forecast could give them a much-needed chance to shine in front of an expectant home crowd. Saturday, June 7: Race day 1, SailGP Race Stadium Race times: 3.30pm-5pm ET / 8.30pm-10pm BST Sunday, June 8: Race day 2, SailGP Race Stadium Race times: 3.30pm-5pm ET / 8.30pm-10pm BST Coverage will be live on CBS Sports Network and YouTube in the United States, viewers in the UK can watch it on TNT Sports. More details on how to watch can be found here.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store