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With the start of the 2026 Tour de France mere days away, most of the world's attention will focus on Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard as they race for the yellow jersey. The sixth consecutive installation of the mega-rivalry is obviously of heavy interest, but I don't think it's the most fascinating two-up contest on the cards. Experienced champions necessarily duke it out every year; by contrast, something like the fight brewing between 19-year-old Frenchman Paul Seixas and 22-year-old Mexican Isaac Del Toro is unprecedented, and far more compelling. That scrap says more about the future of cycling, less for the undeniable talent of these two riders in particular than for the simple fact of their youth. The professional peloton has traditionally been an inhospitable environment for riders this young, yet cycling has been revolutionized by a profound youthward shift over the past half-decade. The shift goes far beyond this Tour's pair of golden children, who are merely at the vanguard of a broader youth movement that has swept through all of sports. Everywhere you look, younger athletes are excelling. A 19-year-old just won the French Open. The two best players on perhaps the best team at the World Cup are 18 and 23. The San Antonio Spurs relied on two rookies, a sophomore, and a 22-year-old to reach the NBA Finals in a playoffs largely short of consequential tricenarians. My Instagram feed is constantly showing me vertical videos of tyke-sized tennis children smacking crisp, ideal backhands. The nurseries are empty, their young charges having transitioned more or less directly from childhood into terrorizing their predecessors. In the process, this cohort of precocious athletes is challenging all manner of long-held conventional wisdom and threatening to redraw the lines around the most important part of any athlete's career: their prime. So, under what circumstances did this youth movement get started? Is it a new, permanent state of affairs, or something more fleeting? Why are so many talented children taking over sports?

The NHL draft was this weekend, and even though we had several weeks to get used to the image of Gavin McKenna in a Toronto Maple Leafs hat, the action in the rest of the top 10 was a good mix of unpredictable and intriguing. The Canucks, at No. 3, committed what has the potential to be an all-time goof-up by drafting their brand-new coach's son, Caleb Malhotra. (Anyone want to tell them how long coaches usually last in the NHL?) The Seattle Kraken, drafting at seven, ended up with a possible steal in defenseman Chase Reid, who surprisingly fell down the board after Buffalo swerved to draft Daxon Rudolph at No. 4 and the two teams that followed didn't change their plans. But of all 32 teams that added new blood, nobody should be more energized about their draft than the San Jose Sharks, who made a pair of major picks at No. 2 and No. 9 just as they're trying to shift into a higher gear. Oh, and also, they got a really really tall guy at the very end. A few years back, the Sharks had sunk to rock bottom of their rebuild. But way down in those depths, they were gifted a glimmer of hope: Macklin Celebrini, the No. 1 pick of 2024, became their anointed franchise savior. He looked very, very good as an 18-year-old in the 2024–25 season, even as the team continued to lose a whole bunch of games, and in his second year, his skills exploded into the kind of fireworks show that gives suffering fans new life. Playing alongside a noticeably better, if far from complete, roster of developing youngsters, Celebrini finished top 10 in the NHL in both goals and assists, dragging the offense to something approaching league average even as the defense lagged far behind. The Sharks still missed the playoffs, but they improved on their previous year's mark by 34 points. The new core that Celebrini led already appeared promising, and especially after this weekend, these guys have earned the burden of genuine expectations. By drafting the winger Ivar Stenberg out of Sweden at No. 2, the Sharks are hoping to get another attacking talent whose upside will be clearly visible right out of the gate. While McKenna's lightning-in-a-bottle quality with the puck on his stick made him Toronto's top choice, there's a general consensus that he's going to have to learn some lessons about the subtler points of the game if he'll ever make the most of that electric skill. Stenberg, on the other hand, feels like a very safe add, with SHL numbers that compare favorably to other prospects who've successfully made the jump. He's got the maturity to make the most of his talent, scouts say, and San Jose can provide him with an ideal situation for a brand-new wingman. Put him on a line with Celebrini, the Sharks hope, and he should get comfortable very quickly.

Malik Beasley has been indicted by federal prosecutors, on charges related to suspicious gambling activity. According to earlier reporting, authorities began looking at Beasley last summer after at least one U.S. sports book noted unusual betting interest on Beasley's statistical production. The suspicious activity reportedly took place during the 2023–24 NBA regular season, when Beasley was a member of the Milwaukee Bucks. Shams Charania reported Monday that the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York is currently working to coordinate Beasley's voluntary surrender sometime this week. You can lose your mind considering too closely the words chosen by Charania in one of his news releases, but in this case you would be right to zero in on "point shaving and prop bets." The indictment, unsealed Monday, names Beasley, former NBA forward Ed Davis, and four co-conspirators, including current player agent Paolo Zamorano, and charges them with "wire fraud conspiracy, bribery in sporting contests, honest services wire fraud conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy," and describes a bribery scheme in which Beasley manipulated his performance in order to rig illegal bets. In an announcement to his office's website, U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. accuses Beasley and his co-conspirators of seeking "to corrupt sports through illegal means." "As alleged, the defendants turned professional basketball into a criminal betting operation, bribing then-NBA player Malik Beasley to fix his performance in multiple games in order to place fraudulent wagers, enrich themselves and cheat legitimate sportsbooks. Bribery and insider betting schemes like this one involving former NBA players and a current NBA player agent who exploited inside NBA information for profit erode the integrity of American sports and victimize the sports-watching public."

The Dog Days of summer in the Northern Hemisphere don't officially begin until the rising of Sirius, the "dog star." This is usually mid-to-late July, and we can thank the Greeks for the canid construction. "On summer nights, star of stars, Orion's Dog they call it," Homer recited in the Iliad, "brightest of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat and fevers to suffering humanity." The Dog Days of the baseball season—those weeks of malaise and joylessness and what feels like the 12th Tigers-Royals series of the year—traditionally kick off after the all-star break, when teams and fans start to really feel the weight of 162 games. The Dog Days for the New York Yankees come a little earlier. June, usually. You can tell because that's when they let Sonny Gray flirt with a no-hitter. Gray threw seven-and-a-third hitless on Sunday night, though Aroldis Chapman would blow the save, forcing the Red Sox to score three in the 10th for the walk-off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-YKALnlMi4

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This puzzle was constructed by August Miller, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. August is a vegetable and dairy farmer who recently relocated from Massachusetts to New York. He is thrilled to have his first puzzle at Defector, and hopes we can all find ways to stay cool this week. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

While it would be asking too much to expect soccer to deliver anything like justice, you can usually count on the sport's sense of humor. That's why we probably shouldn't be surprised that the 2026 World Cup, marred from the outside by the racist caprices of the Trump administration, could best be described at this point as African soccer's coming-out party. Here at the close of the tournament's group stage, the Africans are triumphant. Nine of their 10 World Cup entrants have made it the round of 32. No other continental confederation can better Africa's percentage of knockout qualifiers. Getting so many teams through is impressive in its own right, but doing so has to feel especially rewarding in light of how much skepticism and bullshit African soccer had to endure coming into the World Cup. Whether explicit or just implied, Africa was one of the main targets of the concerns many had about the quality of this tournament due to the newly expanded field. Eurocentric pundits and officials alike penciled these purportedly benighted teams in for a wave of thrashings at the hands of the Old Continent's elite. Then, when the tournament was finally set to begin, African fans, journalists, players, and even referees were subjected to the noxious indignities of Donald Trump's security theatrics, the "lucky" ones merely manhandled by customs agents en route to their American destinations, the less fortunate seeing their entry into the country denied outright. And yet, now that the games have actually started, the Africans have outperformed all expectations. Saturday's group stage–ending round of matches stood in well for what Africa has brought to this World Cup. Three African teams were in action, each aiming to solidify their place in the round of 32. First up was Ghana, which had no reason to be too bothered by its 2-1 loss to Croatia, given that the Black Stars had already sealed their place in the knockout rounds by taking four points from their first two games. Next came DR Congo, which got the win it needed against Uzbekistan to also stamp its ticket to the next round. Finally, there was Algeria-Austria, a game that offered the Desert Warriors a chance to avenge a nearly half-century-old grudge against the Austrians for the infamous Disgrace of Gijon at the 1982 World Cup. Both teams only needed a draw to advance, and a loss would've seen either ousted. But unlike that day in Spain 44 years ago, there would be no collusion this time. At the tail end of a wild match, Algeria, the victim of the non-aggression pact between Austria and West Germany back then, seemed to have gotten their revenge when a stoppage-time Riyad Mahrez goal put his team up 3-2. However, Austria kept hope alive and was redeemed by an equalizer which allowed both teams to go through.

The NBA offseason presents a pit that must be filled with trade rumors, free-agency drama, and delirium-inducing podcast segments. It takes a lot of slop to fill that pit to the brim, which is how you end up with Jaylen Brown and an ESPN dope conspiring to dust off a tiresome conversation about the place of analytics in the NBA. Brown very much appears to be on the trading block, which is a weird place to be for a guy who has won a Finals MVP and is coming off the best individual season of his career, but here we are. It was widely reported that the Celtics dangled Brown for Giannis Antetokounmpo before the Greek Freak was ultimately shipped off to Miami, and I guess once you dangle a guy of Brown's stature and temperament, you can't just undangle him. Type "Jaylen Brown" into Google or your social media platform of choice and you will be blasted by a dozen or so reports, from NBA insiders you've barely heard of, about which teams are angling to pry Brown away from the Celtics. One of those insiders is, I guess, Bobby Marks of ESPN. If you don't immediately recognize his name, you might recognize his schtick: He's the guy who appears across various NBA podcasts to remind listeners what a specific player's salary number is, and assure you that nothing good will ever happen to your team because of how close it is to the second apron. I assume this is what Marks was doing when he made an appearance on the Sirius XM NBA show over the weekend, but he also got little bit out over his skis and shared that an "analytics guy" from an NBA team had told him that he views Brown as "the seventh-best player on a team."

Dublin closed out a thrilling All-Ireland football quarterfinal weekend with a massive and penalty-aided comeback to beat Galway Sunday afternoon in Croke Park, 1-25 to 1-21. Galway was up by six points with just 15 minutes left on the clock. But the game turned Dublin’s way when Galway defender Liam Silke was assessed a black card for fouling on a goal-scoring opportunity. Veteran Dublin forward Con O’Callaghan banged home the penalty shot to knot the score, and his team never looked back. Galway, forced to play a man down for the game’s final 10 minutes, never scored again. The win could be seen as sweet revenge for Dublin manager Ger Brennan. He’d been handed a stout 12-week suspension in March following a donnybrook between Dublin and Galway during a National League match in which Brennan was red-carded for shoving Galway’s strength and conditioning coach Cian Breathnach McGinn. The squad was spiraling downward in the preliminary rounds of the county tournament with Brennan shelved and Dean Rock, a mainstay player on the dynastic Dubs teams of the last decade, forced to serve as interim manager. Brennan was back on the sidelines earlier this month for Dublin's overtime upset of pre-tournament favorite Donegal to reach the quarterfinals. And now they played avengers for him against Galway.

BROOKLYN — Boots Ennis survived the toughest round of his career, then KOed game but overmatched champ Xander Zayas in a beautifully brutal Saturday night title fight at Barclays Center. When Ennis put Zayas on the canvas for the third time of the bout, Zayas's corner decided to save him from himself and throw in the towel with 1:12 left in the seventh round. With the win, Ennis took Zayas's WBO and WBA super welterweight belts and remained undefeated at 36-0. The Philly fighter also greatly advanced his pursuit of imaginary but highly coveted titles like “the face of boxing” and “pound-for-pound champ.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb_jO5KUCuw

Covering WNBA games in person is a strange experience. Enriching, for sure: It's cool to hear directly from players and coaches, to be able to pepper them with whatever questions I'd like. Recently, I was able to cobble their insights into an Olivia Miles profile that received, I suspect, fewer comments than this post will. Sometimes you luck into great color: It was funny, at Wednesday night's Fire-Sky game, to hear Portland head coach Alex Sarama directing his players to hunt Rachel Banham on "every single possession." (She was mercifully benched before they could do this.) The in-person experience is also disorienting. If my powers of observation feel heightened in some ways, they are certainly dulled in others. I've learned to appreciate all the work that goes into constructing the story of a game, work done for me by statisticians, broadcasters, beat writers, and online posters when I'm watching on TV. My eyes supply me no graphics, no tickers, no counters. If a player sits for an unusually long stretch, that doesn't always register to me. It might strike me that a team's offense has slowed down, but I might not clock that they haven't actually scored a field goal in six minutes. Turns out, I'm not very good at watching basketball on my own.  In the play-by-play data, the most controversial moment of the WNBA season, a play from Wednesday night's Mercury-Fever game, is dispassionately tagged as "MISS A. Boston 26' 3PT":