Some background: Both Vollering and Niewiadoma-Phinney have finished in the Top 3 of the last five Tours de France Femmes. Vollering won the 2023 Tour and has been dominant lately, winning last year’s Vuelta a España, this year’s Giro d’Italia, and two of the four one-day Monument races this season. Niewiadoma-Phinney won the 2024 Tour over Vollering by just four seconds, the smallest margin in the history of the men’s or women’s Tours.

On Stage 5, Vollering won over Niewiadoma-Phinney and several other riders, bursting past them in the final meters. Niewiadoma-Phinney took the overall race lead on Stage 7 by attacking, and winning, on Mont Ventoux, giving her a 15-second lead over Vollering. Then Vollering won Stage 8 to take back the lead, putting her up eight seconds up on Niewiadoma-Phinney heading into the final day of the race.

That’s when the tension burst open. On a turn late in the stage, Niewiadoma-Phinney felt that Vollering’s teammate, Célia Gery, intentionally pushed her into the barriers at high speed, allowing Vollering to pull away. (Teammates are supposed to help their leaders by cycling in front of them and blocking the wind, not by physically impeding their opponents.)

Niewiadoma-Phinney confronted Gery in full view of the press, asking, “Why did you do that? Was it part of the plan?” She later said the move by Gery was “childish” and that she had “lost all respect” for her opponents. Vollering defended Gery, saying that the incident was accidental, and that “Kasia knows deep in her heart that that kind of thing just happens.” Niewiadoma-Phinney’s husband, retired American cyclist Taylor Phinney, posted that Gery’s move was not illegal, but “something petty you’d see in a junior race, not a move you’d expect from one of the world’s best teams in the biggest race of the year.”

The incident resurfaced old beef. (Eww, gross sentence.) Vollering shot back that she “didn’t forget about what [Niewiadoma-Phinney] did when I was on the ground two years ago,” referring to the 2024 Tour de France Femmes when she crashed 6.5 km from a stage finish and Niewiadoma-Phinney kept on the gas to take second on the day. That was the year Niewiadoma-Phinney won the yellow jersey that year by four seconds over Vollering; her attack while Vollering was down was part of the difference in the race.

Niewiadoma-Phinney and Vollering seemed to make nice on the road to Nice, riding side by side early in the final stage and having a cordial conversation.

They found themselves next to each other again on the race’s final climb … but Vollering pulled away from Niewiadoma-Phinney and won the Tour by more than a minute.

Clearly, the war of words fueled Vollering, who said after winning that “we were hugely motivated last night to go all-in because Célia had a really difficult evening. This one was for her too.”

Vollering is one of many Dutch cycling stars who began their career in speed skating, competing on the ice until she was 23. (Turns out, you need the same muscles for both … and, well, there aren’t exactly a lot of mountains in the Netherlands, so you’re not gonna get inspired to climb the Alps that way.) However, I suspect she’s the only Dutch cycling star who initially began their career as a florist.

Last but not least, I feel obligated to point out that this is the second straight year I have predicted the winner of the Tour de France Femmes. I’m not going to make any predictions for any other sporting event. Just accurate TdFF predictions, every year, from now until I miss.

Quick summary: Kawhi Leonard is still very good at basketball. *(When he plays.) Leonard was traded from the Clippers to the Raptors this offseason. However, the Raptors have since paused that trade pending the results of the NBA’s investigation, which has been ongoing since last September. The Raptors are a potential contender with Kawhi … if he ever plays for them.

Almost a year ago, PTFO revealed that Leonard received a bizarre endorsement deal from a now-defunct, fraudulent company called Aspiration into which Clippers owner Steve Ballmer invested millions. Leonard received significantly more money from the company than some of Aspiration’s other very famous celebrity endorsers, but he was never publicly announced as a spokesperson for the company and never promoted the company.

That alone seemed like a pretty clear example of salary cap manipulation, but now there are two more alleged cases. Leonard also received an ownership stake in a second-division soccer team called Rhode Island FC. You’d think the team would be eager to announce that such a famous person is associated with their brand — they even made a public announcement that NBA journeyman Daniel Theis had acquired a stake in the team — but Leonard’s ownership stake was never publicly announced.

And now, it seems Leonard had a similar endorsement deal with Daktronics, a company that makes in-stadium displays and scoreboards. (It would be easier to say “they make jumbotrons” but Sony has the trademark to Jumbotron.) Daktronics has never had celebrity endorsers, because their clients are professional sports teams that would not be impressed by the idea that a pro athlete likes their products. However, after striking a company-saving deal to build the massive display inside the Clippers’ new home arena, Daktronics allegedly agreed to pay money to Leonard. Again, Leonard was never announced as a spokesperson, and never promoted the company.

Ballmer is, by far, the league’s wealthiest owner. Like, he has $100 billion more than anybody else. It makes sense that he was more eager than anybody to use that extreme wealth to his advantage.

Maybe somebody out there still believed that the Aspiration thing was a weird decision made by a poorly-run company that went defunct and whose CEO is now in jail for fraud. Clearly the company made a lot of mistakes! But now we’re looking at a pattern of shady deals from multiple companies. And the NBA isn’t a court of law: It can act on circumstantial evidence when making a decision, and there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence piling up.

What gets me is that Leonard and the Clippers went to such great lengths to concoct these elaborate schemes … and they could’ve probably avoided scrutiny by simply asking Kawhi to appear in some commercials for these companies he was supposedly endorsing. When did everybody stop doing plausible deniability?

The NBA has only ever acted on one case of salary cap manipulation (that I know of). The league doled out a harsh punishment for a relatively minor infraction. In 2000, Joe Smith agreed to sign a series of small contracts with the Timberwolves, with a wink-wink understanding that he would eventually be given a much, much larger deal. The NBA stripped three first-round picks from Minnesota and suspended the team’s owner and general manager.

(It seems possible that the Milwaukee Bucks just did the exact same thing with Gary Trent Jr., a deal which is also being investigated by the NBA, but people are less worked up about it because 1. Gary Trent Jr. stinks, 2. the Bucks are probably going to stink, and 3. there are no fraudulent tree companies involved.)

Long story short: Salary cap manipulation is something pro sports leagues take very seriously. Everybody agreed not to do this. A league’s CBA is a delicate document negotiated painstakingly by a bunch of parties usually pulling in opposite directions. If those parties don’t take their agreed-upon obligations seriously, the whole thing could go awry.

And besides: Teams have traded away their star players to avoid salary cap repercussions. Players have taken life-changing paycuts to help their teams put together better rosters. And the 29 other owners are probably pretty mad about Ballmer trying to build a better roster by spending more money than everybody agreed upon. We had a good thing going with the salary cap! You’re making the rest of us look cheap!

The Kawhi situation seems worse than the Joe Smith situation. That was a GM and an agent shaking hands; this was a complex, creative operation featuring multiple third parties, with apparent collaboration between the team and player.

The great Tom Ziller proposed a list of potential punishments to fit such an unusual Sports Crime. Personally, I don’t think the NBA is taking all this time to do nothing.

First of all: that’s about 14 mph for a whole mile. With a stroller, which is about as un-aerodynamic as something can get. And it’s not like this was a racing stroller, if such a thing exists.

And let’s be honest: Baby Biebelhausen was not contributing much to the record. Those little legs were flailing all over the place. Terrible form, kid!

(I mean, I’m assuming that’s Biebelhausen’s baby. Surely there is a BYOB policy at elite stroller running competitions.)

The run took place over Cleveland’s Hope Memorial Bridge, home to the famous Guardian statues that the baseball team is named after. A bridge seems harder to me than a regular track, for stroller-pushing purposes: It slopes upwards to start, which is obviously hard. But on the downhill section, you have to make sure the stroller doesn’t roll away from you, which I assume gets you disqualified.

Biebelhausen’s 4:17 stroller mile is 10 seconds faster than the beer mile world record of 4:27, set in 2025 by Canada’s Corey Bellemore. No world record yet for a beer-stroller mile that I can tell.

For the curious, here are some other mile records from Guinness World Records.

Fastest mile dribbling a basketball: 4 minutes, 23 seconds, by Spain’s Christian López. (López is gonna come up a lot here; he’s a “serial record setter,” and perhaps most impressively, secured the @_recordman instagram handle.)

Fastest mile dribbling a soccer ball: 5 minutes, 40 seconds, also by López. I guess it’s harder to run fast when you’re dribbling a ball with the feet you need to run than when dribbling a ball with your hands. Or maybe Christian is just a hooper.

Fastest mile controlling a tennis ball: 4 minutes, 53 seconds, also by López. Actually wouldn’t have guessed this would be faster than the soccer ball.

Fastest mile pushing a wheelchair: 5 minutes, 14 seconds, by Great Britain’s Iain Plumb and Paul Jameson, who has motor neuron disease.

Fastest mile in high heels: 6 minutes, 10 seconds, also by López.

Fastest mile dribbling two basketballs: 8 minutes, 28 seconds, by Michael Dodd in Nicholasville, Kentucky, in 2025. Gonna be honest, adding a second basketball doesn’t seem like it should add another four minutes.

Fastest blindfolded mile: 5 minutes, 23 seconds, by Ted Simmons in North Baltimore, Ohio, in December 2020. (People were bored in December 2020.)

Fastest mile wearing a 100-pound pack: 7 minutes, 29 seconds, by Ireland’s Nathan Missin, also in December 2020. (Like I said: People were bored in December 2020.)

Fastest mile piggyback race: 11 minutes, 11 seconds, by Great Britian’s Owen Larsen (back) and Jordan Botwright (piggy.) (I believe those are the technical terms for the two positions.)

Fastest mile hopping on one leg: 18 minutes, 25 seconds, by Peter Nestler, in Medina, Ohio, in 2014. (The whole excruciating video is on YouTube.)

(I don’t love spotlighting Guinness records, since the company is kind of a racket rather than a legitimate sanctioning body, and the racket is dependent on press coverage of people setting wacky world records, and I am here providing press coverage of people setting wacky world records, but look: It’s August 10th.