SPEEDWAY: Sheffield moved a point clear of Ipswich in the Premiership after Chris Holder scored 16 points from six rides and Josh Pickering bagged 14+1 as they raced to a 50-40 victory over bottom club Birmingham on Thursday night. In the Premiership’s other fixture Max Fricke top-scored yet again for the Leicester Lions with 13+1 points in their comfortable 53-37 win over injury-hit King’s Lynn. 

CYCLING: Geraint Thomas will start his fourteenth and final Tour de France when the peloton rolls out of Lille tomorrow. The Cardiff-born double Olympic track gold-medallist won the yellow jersey in 2018 after claiming two mountain stages, including an iconic finish on Alpe D’Huez to finish almost two minutes ahead of Tom Dumoulin with Chris Froome in third. Thomas was runner-up to team-mate Egan Bernal in 2019’s Tour.

MEN’S RUGBY UNION: Wales will be captained by hooker Dewi Lake when they face Japan in Kitakyushu tomorrow morning looking to end their 17-test match losing sequence that stretches back to October 2023. While the British and Irish Lions play the Waratahs in Sydney, Scotland are up against the Maori All Blacks in Whangarei, Ireland play Georgia and George Ford is expected to win his 100^th cap as England take on Argentina. 

HORSE RACING: Four-time champion flat jockey Osian Murphy was fined £70,000 and banned from driving for 20 months after pleading guilty to driving while over the limit for alcohol. Murphy was arrested after crashing his car into a tree in April. The court was informed that Murphy is paid a regular income of £1,250 a week with irregular earnings of £250,000 a year. The winning jockey in this year’s Epsom Derby earned approximately £75,000.