Weird Premier League day

Manchester City dropping points. Newcastle winning. A drone stopping play. It was a strange day in the Premier League.

Few could have expected City to fail to win at Southampton, with a 1-1 draw ending the leaders’ 12-match winning run that dated to Oct. 30. City is ahead of Liverpool by 12 points but the Reds have played two games fewer, meaning there is still some life in the title race.

Before a 1-0 win at Leeds, Newcastle’s only previous victory in its 23 games in all competitions this season was against Burnley on Dec. 4. Beating Leeds wasn’t enough to lift the Saudi-owned northeast team out of the relegation zone, yet it might be the start of a late-season resurgence for Newcastle.

Most bizarre of all was players from Brentford and Wolverhampton being led off the field by the referee because a drone was hovering above the pitch in their match in west London. Play was suspended for nearly 20 minutes in a match Wolves won 2-1.

Ice skating: Mai Mihara won her second career Four Continents figure skating title in Tallinn, Estonia, in a strong recovery from missing out on the Japanese team for the Winter Olympics, and Americans Audrey Lu and Misha Mitrofanov took pairs gold.

Mihara was nearly flawless in the free skate with a program full of triple jumps until she ran out of momentum on her final spin.

Lu and Mitrofanov became the first U.S. pair to win Four Continents gold since 2018 after recovering from Lu’s early fall on a triple toe loop to post 120.75 in the free skate for a total of 189.10. Emily Chan and Spencer Akira Howe of the U.S. climbed from third to second in the free skate to claim silver with 180.94, with bronze for Canada’s Evelyn Walsh and Trennt Michaud on 179.70.

Skiing: Dave Ryding became the first British winner in the 55-year history of the Alpine skiing World Cup, triumphing in the slalom in Kitzbuhel, Austria. Ryding, sixth after the opening run, was leading the final leg when he saw the last five racers all make big mistakes and finish well behind — or not at all. A week after crashing at high speed in Austria, Italy’s Sofia Goggia captured her fourth win in five World Cup downhills this season despite a mishap-filled run on the shortened Olympia delle Tofane course in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

Ramona Siebenhofer of Austria was edged for second and Ester Ledecka, the Czech athlete who won golds in both skiing and snowboarding at the 2018 Olympics, finished third. Overall World Cup leader Mikaela Shiffrin of the U.S. skipped the race.