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In antiquity, tennis players could win with a diverse mix of skillsets, with some even relying on speed, anticipation, net touch. This variety is often mourned by the old heads. Because in the sport's present—and, given the arc of string and racket tech, its foreseeable future—the skill that looms above all else is mighty ball-striking from the baseline. Though I do mourn the loss of off-speed demons on grass, for example, I have made my peace with this reality, and perhaps because I had my own tastes shaped by this evolution in the game, I am content to watch a punishing groundstroke all day. But I'd enjoy it even more if there's at least some neat technical twist. My ideal would be a player who thrives in the today's power-baseline meta, but does it while cultivating a technique at risk of extinction—like, say, the one-handed backhand. Today, I present one to you one brilliant pupil: an 18-year-old Austrian named Lilli Tagger, who won the WTA 250 in Prague on Sunday, her first tour-level title.Tagger grew up skiing in the Alps, like Jannik Sinner, only on the other side of the border—her East Tyrol to his South Tyrol. At age 13 she crossed that border to train full-time in Italy, where she is now coached by Francesca Schiavone, whose 2010 Roland-Garros title was the most recent won by a WTA one-hander, and hopefully not the last. It's not too grandiose to say that Tagger is the most likely active player to end that drought; it's mostly just a commentary on the shot's scarcity. But there's already enough depth to her game that I'm increasingly willing to back that part of the prediction, too. Though a newcomer to the tour, Tagger already lords above almost all her colleagues at 6-foot-1, and those long levers grant her crackling power. When on her front foot, she can snap off comical winners off the backhand side, including the ultra-rare inside-out backhand return winner, which feels like glimpsing an endangered species of bird when seen in action. In general, the cost of height is agility, and while Tagger can surely be wrong-footed, she changes directions more smoothly than the similarly statured Elena Rybakina. If, as most one-handers do, she develops great feel with her slice, that will also shore up her defensive repertoire. Though her serve is still developing, I'm willing to bet that any player this tall can arrive at an elite delivery, if not one of Rybakina's historic quality. Above all, you can tell that Tagger is still growing up and adjusting her tactics in real time to meet her physical tools. With that size, shot-making, and skills in flux, Tagger makes for a rewarding prospect to follow. As with any player at this phase, it's more fun to imagine the eventual destination without getting too caught up in the current state of things. Even so, the current state of things is already lethal. During Indian Wells, I wrote about Tagger in the context of dwindling one-handers. Since then, she inched up the rankings and into the top 100, entering last week as the world's No. 74 player. Whenever I tuned in during the spring and summer, Tagger could look like a very different player from match to match, her form bobbing, but on the hard courts of Prague she found her rhythm against two consecutive qualifiers and only dialed in as the week progressed. In the semifinals Tagger took out world No. 26 Barbora Krejcikova, which was the second top-30 win of her career. On Sunday, playing in her first WTA final, she beat No. 54 Daria Snigur, digging out of a 2-5 hole in the first set to win the title 7-6(3), 6-2. (The highlights don't embed but you are forcefully encouraged to click the links and watch those backhands in context.) Once the points from the Prague title kick in, Tagger will become the youngest player in the top 50. I would have predicted she'd win her first title on clay or on slow hard courts, but doing it on medium-speed hard is a good sign for anyone worried that the one-hander might get rushed.

PARIS — Every story has a beginning and an end, but the best stories have worthwhile middles. Narrative stakes are established are established and then resolved. It's what happens in between that makes a story. This is where the greatest cyclist of all time currently finds himself. Pogacar rode to his fifth Tour victory with an astonishing sense of joy. The ennui that plagued his fourth Tour win has dissolved. His greatest rival is well behind him. The yellow jersey that weighed him down now buoys him. There's nothing more for him to do as a competitor except rack up more records, a potentially paralyzing dynamic he's seemingly found a way to neutralize. Pogacar has won five Tours de France, equaling four others who were all years older than Pogacar when they won their final Tour. When I asked his director, Matxin Fernandez, what was different about this Tour, he was nearly moved to tears thinking about the accomplishment of getting to five. "Fuck, I mean, it's amazing," he grinned, apologizing for getting carried away. "It's like Hollywood. I remember watching Indurain win his fifth [in 1995] and now Tadej has done it. I'm so proud." So what was different this time around, and what lessons are there to be learned about how the rest of Pogacar's story might go?

Let's acknowledge that there is no conversation to be had about who the best player in baseball is, so long as Shohei Ohtani is drawing breath and applying his skills as a two-way player. The gavel has long been banged on that issue. But there's a lot of baseball being played, and a lot of cool guys doing the playing, and one of those guys is Pete Crow-Armstrong, who in an Ohtani-less universe is the best player in baseball. Crow-Armstrong and the Cubs beat the crap out of the Pirates last night, tagging Paul Skenes for five runs in an 11-0 victory. Crow-Armstrong was responsible for most of that damage, going 4-for-5 with a homer, three RBI, and three runs scored. He also hit two doubles and stole a base. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nClz8QqS92g

ALPE D'HUEZ, France — Roughly halfway up the final climb of Stage 19, and roughly five hours before the riders hit the base, our car indulged the thick snarl of besotted fans who wanted to do the wave with us. This slowed us across a critical speed threshold, beyond which our car was no longer something worth avoiding but rather something worth rocking. I'd seen videos of cars getting shaken the night before, and hoped to get shaken myself, though I was not prepared for how jarring and violent it felt in the car, as if we were pebbles and the hooting mass of jolly Europeans was the flood. This was Alpe d'Huez, the most legendary and chaotic arena in cycling. There is nothing like Alpe d'Huez in all of sports. FranceTV reported that 600,000 people slammed onto the sides of the Alpe, the most dedicated arriving over a week ago, the stragglers on foot and on bikes after French cops shut down car traffic more than 24 hours before the race. Alpe d'Huez is 13.8 kilometers long at an 8.1 percent grade, though the important number to know is 21. That's the number of hairpin corners, which compresses the climb like the innards of an accordion and turn it into a natural arena. In a sport whose operative spatial property is diffusion, the Alpe's tortuous nature gives fans the rare luxury of density. This year, Tour organizers made the prospect of pilgrimage more enticing by running Stage 19 up the main path, then running Stage 20 up the Col de Sarenne on the backside and having riders once again finish on the final four kilometers of the traditional Alpe. Offered a rare two-for-one deal, fans obliged and packed onto Alpe by the hundreds of thousands. This is part of what I mean when I say there's nothing like this in sports: a crowd six times the size of those in the biggest traditional stadia, distributed across nine miles of road, inches away from the best riders in the world, and it's all free. In the summer of the $10,000 Knicks ticket and the heinously expensive World Cup, the Tour de France's financial accessibility stands out even further. But what fans save in money, they sacrifice in convenience, since the logistics of watching a stage Alpe d'Huez require a serious level of dedication. You only do something like this if you really care about it.

There are aspects of being president of the United States that Donald Trump is really bad at, and others at which he is significantly worse. It goes without saying that none of that is improving, but what is most notable about his performance in the position is the extent to which he has never really bothered to figure out what the job is. From the earliest days of his presidency there was a sort of inchoate yearning that emanated from the more respectable reaches of the political culture for the possibility that Trump would not so much grow into the job as be transformed by its sheer prestige into a totally different type of person—not just chastened by the awesome responsibility of it all, but changed by it in a way that forced him to become human in all the ways that he had spent his life avoiding. This was embarrassing even then, and seems more so after a decade of Trump-centric national humiliation and decline. It's easy enough to understand as a sort of elite coping mechanism; no one really knew what to expect from the installation of one of the dumbest and worst men this country has ever produced into its highest office, although it was natural to hope the outcome might be something other than "exactly what you would expect to happen in those circumstances." It is perhaps more easily and correctly understood as an expression of just how much that elite cohort believed in the majesty of the edifice they'd constructed around the shabby, brutal business of American politics. There might be some dead-enders still holding out for a Grinch-type outcome, there, but after a decade in Trump's fragrant shadow it's clear that things broke the other way—every institution and tradition and office held up as grand and permanent rapidly and readily debased and degraded itself in Trump's image, or in his honor. They could not believe that this office might become as stupid and small as he has made it, because they'd worked so hard and for so long to make it so large. But what was implicit in the desecrations and derelictions of his first term is explicit and thuddingly literal in his second; he is literally supergluing shit onto the walls of the Oval Office and kicking everyone off his lawn. In every sense, the White House will require a gut renovation once he's finally extricated from it. There's just too much grease and gilt on all of it now.

DUBLIN — The All-Ireland Senior Football final, the Irish Super Bowl, takes place July 26 at Dublin's historic Croke Park. This year’s game mismatches Kerry and Mayo, Gaelic football’s biggest winners against the most notorious losers in the ancient sport’s history.  Kerry fans expected their team to be here. They always do. They’re the defending champs and will be playing for their 40th title. No other county comes close. Legendary manager Paidi Ó Sé once called his team’s supporters "the roughest type of fucking animals you could ever deal with,” because of their Sam Maguire Cup-or-bust standard. The star-laden squad relies most on David Clifford, a three-time player of the year and the only player of his generation that comes up in GOAT conversations.  All of Ireland expects Mayo to lose.

Perhaps there was no weirder possible conclusion to this saga: LeBron James is moving to Philadelphia. Shams Charania reported Friday that James will sign with the 76ers on a two-year, $8 million deal with a player option. The 41-year-old won't be ring-chasing with Steph Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, nor any other top-10 player, nor his hometown Cavaliers. Instead he'll join an undeniably talented but aesthetically hideous assortment of Sixers looking to take advantage of a reshuffled Eastern Conference. Can't say I understand it on any level: narrative, on-court, commercial, or otherwise. Perhaps it has something to with James's long-standing belief in cumulative star talent rather than a specific mesh of skillsets; remember when he thought Russell Westbrook would work well alongside him? Perhaps he's sympathetic to Jaylen Brown, and is picking up a sword in the anti-"analytics" battle for the game's soul. But this is certainly not his best route to winning a fifth title. His most talented teammate, Joel Embiid, played 38 games in the last regular season. Maybe James was really enamored with one or two of his performances in last season's playoffs, but there are more medically sound bets to make when it comes to a late-career title hunt. Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe are spry young guards, and they'll be a delight with James in transition, but neither is the sort of knockdown off-ball shooter that optimizes James in the halfcourt. I look forward to the facial expressions he'll make the first time a Brown iso fritters away the end of a close game. The Sixers' starting lineup will leave lots of weak points for opposing offenses to attack—do not tell me that 32-year-old Embiid will be anchoring a championship defense. Again, there's a lot of talent on this roster; I just have no idea how it will all fit together. That's Nick Nurse's job, if he can keep it.

ORCIÈRES-MERLETTE, France — When Richard Carapaz spread his arms in celebration after pounding up the final climb of Stage 18, I felt a sense of relief. The champagne flowed, the tears streamed. The hundreds of days that dozens of support staff worked in the cloistered, unforgiving world of professional cycling had paid off. EF Education-EasyPost had finally validated its strong Tour de France with a stage win. The Tour de France awards a wide bounty of prizes beyond the yellow jersey to its 23 teams. You can target one of the other three jerseys, which take comprehensive three-week efforts and team support. You can go after one of the 21 stages, more a matter of tactics than strategy, and also subject to the whims of the biggest teams. Or you can scrap for the smaller stuff, like winning some intermediate sprints, wearing one of the jerseys for a day or two, or simply being visible. Variety is one part of what makes the Tour's competitive landscape so well-tended; the other is scarcity. While every team will enter the race with different goals, there's not enough to go around. The fun part is seeing which prizes each team pursues, who that puts them in conflict or alliance with, and how their plans are forced to evolve over the three weeks of racing. What does a successful Tour look like? Every team has a different answer. EF is the perfect team through which to understand how complicated and intriguing this all is. Unlike UAE or Visma, EF wasn't going to target the yellow jersey. But they're also stronger than the bottom-feeders, and as such have larger ambitions than merely notable participation. For example, Lotto has had a good Tour despite having only won some combativity awards, simply because they keep putting riders in doomed breakaways and having them hold on longer than chasing teams expect. Last year, EF had a dream Tour, with Ben Healy taking a stage win, finishing 10th overall, spending some time in the yellow jersey, and winning the overall combativity prize. This time around, Healy didn't come into the Tour fully healthy, and though EF had superstar rider Richard Carapaz back, he was also recovering from surgery and couldn't realistically target another Tour podium. So it was time to win some stages.

Some people are fans of the New York Jets. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Jets. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: New York Jets. https://twitter.com/iJordanMoore/status/2075649848762569003

My eyes kept going back to the hand, so tender and gently placed that you could forget these were bodies forged from marble. For all of the grabbing passion and sexual infatuation of Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss, the hands always seemed to suggest something much softer and loving. The woman, leaning back and on the edge of the rough base stone, could easily slip. But without any grabbing or force, his hand steadies her. His palm and thumb hover over her leg, and the only touch is by the tips of his fingers, as if she is breakable and precious. The bodies embrace haphazardly, but the hands are patient and deliberate. The lovers were modeled after the adulterous lovers, Francesca and Paulo, from Dante’s Divine Comedy. But I could never feel anything doomed or sinful about the pair. All I saw was the tension between the hesitancy and the urgency of a first kiss—the feeling of fear and desire all wrapped up in one.  The Kiss was my first introduction to the works of Rodin. From then on, I became fascinated by the stone figures Rodin seemed to capture in motion, as well as the depths of feeling he built from the subtle details of the body. My first summer in Philadelphia, I spent many afternoons journeying to the Rodin Museum, sitting in the sculpture garden or wandering the small rooms to take in the subtleties. Just like with The Kiss, my eyes are always drawn to the hands.  Writing on his weeks spent observing Rodin, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: