Coco Gauff beat Jessica Pegula to win the Cincinnati Open

Coco Gauff beat Jessica Pegula 6-2, 6-4 on Sunday evening to win the Cincinnati Open, a hard-court tournament in Ohio that is held the week before the US Open. Both players are American, and it was the first time two Americans had met in that final since 1970. Gauff won the first five games and the whole thing was over in a little over an hour. It is her second title in Cincinnati and the twelfth of her career. In the men's final, Arthur Fils of France beat the American Frances Tiafoe 6-3, 1-6, 6-0, and the US Open begins next Sunday in New York.

It took fifty-six years to get two American players into the same final, and just over an hour to get one of them out of it.

PHOTO: ALL-PRO REELS / CC BY-SA 2.0 / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Manchester United lost 2-0 at Hull City on the first day of the season

The Premier League, the top division of English soccer, started on Saturday. Manchester United, the most decorated club in the country, travelled to Hull City in northern England and lost 2-0. Hull were promoted this summer and had not played in the top division since 2017. Both goals came from corner kicks, the restart where the ball is placed at the corner of the field and everybody runs at it; Semi Ajayi scored after seventeen minutes and Nobel Mendy headed the second after thirty-eight.

Hull City had been out of this league since 2017 and needed thirty-eight minutes to go two goals up in it, which is quicker than most reunions get started.

PHOTO: KIERAN CLARKE / CC BY 2.0 / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Wyndham Clark lost a five-shot lead and won by three anyway

Wyndham Clark won the BMW Championship in St. Louis, Missouri on Sunday, the second of the three events that make up golf's postseason. He had led since Thursday, then handed the entire five-shot cushion back to Rory McIlroy within eleven holes. He did not make a single birdie, a hole finished one shot better than the course expects, until the sixteenth, and then made three in a row to finish at seventeen under par and win by three. It was his third win of the year, and the season ends next weekend in Atlanta with the top thirty players.

Golf gives nothing for leading and everything for finishing, and Clark spent an afternoon demonstrating the gap between the two.

PHOTO: TITLEIST / CC BY 3.0 / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Lando Norris won the Dutch Grand Prix; Max Verstappen crashed out on the first lap

Formula 1 came back from its summer break at Zandvoort, a seaside track in the Netherlands. Lando Norris started first and finished first, eleven and a half seconds clear of Kimi Antonelli, with George Russell third. Max Verstappen, who is Dutch and had most of the crowd, lost the back of his car at the end of the opening lap and hit the wall hard enough to stop the race; he climbed out and confirmed he was fine. Antonelli, who is nineteen, now leads the season standings by fifty-nine points.

Norris led from the start, finished eleven seconds clear, and still was not the story, because the story crashed on lap one and walked away.

NO LICENSED PHOTO ON FILE. THE MASCOT WILL REPRESENT THE SPORT.

Every NFL team has to let go of thirty-seven players by next Sunday evening

American football teams carry ninety players through the summer and are allowed to keep fifty-three once the season starts. This year the league moved that deadline earlier, to six o'clock on Sunday evening, August 30, the day after the last practice game. Coaches used to have until Tuesday. Players who are let go can be claimed by another team the following afternoon or signed to a practice squad, which is a reserve roster that trains all season without playing. The second weekend of practice games finished on Saturday and none of it counted.

Every team goes from ninety players to fifty-three by six o'clock on a Sunday evening, and the fifty-three report for work on Monday.

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Shohei Ohtani hit his thirtieth home run for the sixth year in a row

Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers reached thirty home runs on Tuesday in Denver, a 448-foot shot into the bullpen during a 7-6 win over the Colorado Rockies. It is the sixth season running that he has got there. He is also the first Dodger to manage thirty in three consecutive years since Gary Sheffield stopped doing it in 2001. Baseball's regular season has about five weeks left, and Milwaukee and Tampa Bay still hold the best records in their halves of the sport.

Thirty home runs in six straight seasons is the kind of consistency most people only manage with lunch.

NO LICENSED PHOTO ON FILE. THE MASCOT WILL REPRESENT THE SPORT.

The Golden State Valkyries have made the playoffs in both years they have existed

The Golden State Valkyries, a WNBA team that played its first game in 2025, beat the Dallas Wings on Monday to qualify for the playoffs for the second time in two seasons. They are 25-9 and second in the league behind Minnesota. Only fourteen teams in the history of North American professional sport have reached the postseason in each of their first two seasons. The Valkyries give up fewer points than any other team in the league, and the WNBA pauses on August 31 for a month while the World Cup is played.

Fourteen teams in the history of North American sport have made the playoffs in each of their first two seasons, and this one did it by being harder to score against than anybody else, which is the least glamorous way to be very good.

NO LICENSED PHOTO ON FILE. THE MASCOT WILL REPRESENT THE SPORT.

The Tour of Spain began in Monaco

The Vuelta a España, a three-week bicycle race and the last of cycling's three grand tours, started on Saturday with a 9.4-kilometre time trial through the streets of Monaco. Tadej Pogačar of Slovenia won it by nine hundredths of a second and took the red jersey worn by the overall leader. On Sunday the race covered 223 kilometres into southern France, where Matthew Brennan, a 21-year-old Briton riding his first grand tour, won the sprint at the finish. Pogačar still leads, by nine seconds. The race reaches Spain later this week and ends in Granada on September 13.

The race is named after Spain, started in Monaco, and spent Sunday in France. Somebody was paid to plan that.

PHOTO: FILIP BOSSUYT / CC BY 2.0 / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Nothing happened. You're welcome.

Hockey is still between seasons. Two teams signed spare defencemen at the league minimum this week, and the department has decided that does not count.

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