Virus puts Tour back

THE Women’s Tour has been called off for a second straight summer due to the pandemic – but could still be staged later this year.

Organisers are looking at possible dates of October 4-9 after abandoning the planned start on June 7.

The race was planned to begin in Bicester and end with a stage from Haverhill to Felixstowe.

It is still hoped the original route can be maintained if the new dates are approved.

Race director Mick Bennett said: “We hope that by aiming to stage the race in October we can give the teams and public something to look forward to at the tail-end of the summer.”

THE killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter marches and the storming of the US Capitol have stirred the emotions in two of America’s greatest boxing legends.

With the 34th anniversary of their $100m Superfight in Vegas (above) om the horizon, Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard see a lot of their young years in modern-day USA.

And although they are both in their mid-60s, they still feel the anger and frustration as acutely now.

Hagler, 66, witnessed notorious race riots in his youth in his home city of Newark, New Jersey, which left 26 people dead.

In Central Ward, the main black area where Hagler lived with his mother and five siblings, National Guardsmen described the situation as “a war zone.”

To Hagler, it felt “like the end of the world”.

The bullets which blasted into the family’s third-floor apartment and penetrated plasterboard above one of the beds left marks far deeper than those embedded in the walls of their tenement building. “People being killed in the street, stores getting broken into and robbed, it was scary,” Hagler said. “I went through all of that growing up, the riots, a lot of poverty – I had to fight all my life.”

For Leonard, who grew up in inner-city Washington D.C. before his family moved to the outskirts, the insurrection at the Capitol last month stirred his own memories of white supremacy.

As a young boy, he visited the Washington Monument with four friends one day and walked into a restaurant to ask for a glass of water.

“N ***** , get outta here,” he was told. Stunned and frightened, he ran home.

“I was eight or nine years old and had never experienced such a volatile anger,” Leonard, 64, recalled.

“I told my mom, ‘This man called me a n ***** and told me to get out’. She looked at me and said, ‘Don’t worry about it, son, don’t worry’. That was her way of protecting me.”

In his extraordinary career, Leonard won Olympic gold and world titles in five weight divisions from welterweight (10st 7lb) to light heavyweight (12st 7lb).

The pinnacle was his controversial split-decision victory over Hagler, one of the most astonishing comebacks in sport.

The death of Floyd last year persuaded Leonard to speak out about race relations as he had rarely done before. “Even though I was a boxing champion, I’m not confrontational outside the ring,” he said. “But where we are today, I’m confrontational.”

“We’re all on this earth together,” Hagler added. “I don’t look at people as black, white or whatever. I look at people for who and what they are.”

The Superfight: Marvelous Marvin Hagler - Sugar Ray Leonard by Brian Doogan is available now in bookstores

MIKE DEAN will return to refereeing in the Premier League on Saturday having stood down last weekend after receiving death threats online.

Dean will take charge of Burnley’s clash with West Brom at Turf Moor. The 52-year-old and his family received the threats on social media after Dean had handed out two controversial red cards which were later rescinded.

Dean (above) asked to be stood down from the next round of Premier League fixtures, although he was in charge of the FA Cup fifthround tie between Leicester and Brighton at the King Power Stadium last week.